Doctor, Doctor!
by Tawa bids you good day
Summary: A mysterious collapse leaves the Doctor trapped in a human hospital. Rose must figure out his illness, and of course save the world, without his voice in her ear. [10th era.]
1. A Chip Foray Goes Terribly Wrong

This would be the first Doctor Who fic I've attempted, so let's not all expect too much :). Also, I'm not sure how soon it will be updated, as real life busi-nesses may get in the way a lot.

_Disclaimer: Doctor Who property of BBC. Oh, if only it belonged to me. Alas._

Full Summary: A visit home to London proves more hazardous than expected for one lone Time Lord – is the Doctor's mysterious illness born from natural causes, or something more sinister? It's up to Rose to save the world, all by herself this time – and keep the London medical practitioners from finding out the truth about their non-human patient.

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"Hello, doll," Jackie cried, throwing her arms around her daughter's neck. "You're home so early!"

Rose laughed, gasping a little under her mother's firm arms. "Mum, your earring's caught in my hair. How long've we been gone this time?"

"Oh, sorry," Jackie extracted her jewellery and stood back to help Rose get her pack off. "Only a couple of weeks. God almighty, what's this thing full of? A whole department store's worth of knickers? What you been doing?" she flashed a quick glare at the Doctor, standing behind her daughter, who was inspecting a wall-photo of a fat, pink, infant Rose.

"Bags of dirt," Rose beamed.

"Oh, don't be silly," Jackie replied, following Rose through the small flat's living room. "Can you pop the kettle on, sweetums? I've only just got in – you're lucky you didn't arrive earlier or I'd have found you sitting on the doorstep like a pair of tramps."

"That's us," agreed Rose, opening the cupboard. "Got any biscuits?"

"Middle cupboard. Rose – this thing _is_ full of bags of dirt!" Jackie cried, wrinkling her nose as she opened the pack.

"Told you," Rose said. "It's from the hills of Magritte on Ala – Alu – Aleh – somewhere near the middle of the milky way. It's brilliant – you put plants in it."

"I know, Rose, it's _dirt._"

"No, see, you put dead plants in and they come back to life and if you make a garden you can grow anything, no matter the temperature or stuff like that, really fast too – and they never die, so's long as you give them a bit of water every now and then. Just don't spill it on any wooden furniture or your chairs and tables start sprouting roots and branches."

"But I don't have anywhere for a garden," Jackie said, holding up a bag of the rich black soil and looking at with confusion.

Rose's face fell. "Well, yeah, but I sort of thought you could do pot plants and window-boxes and things, and I could bring cuttings and seeds from wherever I go so you'd have plants from all over the galaxy…"

Jackie could hear the urgent need to please in her daughter's voice and quickly dropped the dirt back into the pack with a smile, pecking Rose on the cheek. "I'll put it to good use, darling."

Ten minutes later, Rose was sitting at Jackie's linoleum table popping a coke can while the Doctor stirred his steaming tea and described their latest brush with alien death in full living colour to Rose's mother, who felt her face grow more horrified with each word.

He gesticulated wildly as he explained. "And then, right when we think things couldn't get any worse…"

"I even said that, remember?" Rose interjected. "I said, 'God, could this be any worse?'"

"You did, you did," the Doctor flapped his hand at her to hush her. Rose rolled her eyes and took a swig of coke. Jackie wondered if they had anything like coke in the middle of the milky way. "So right when things can't get any worse, we look around, and this _stuff_ starts pouring out of the grills in the walls."

"Smelled like hot tar," Rose added.

"Right, right. It was aqueous Prue-tree sap, totally caustic to carbon molecules, eat the flesh off your bones in like, a minute. And these spear-brandishing priests are wading towards us – they've got silicon-based skin, these jokers, the sap doesn't hurt _them_. And I'm thinking we're bloody done for, 'cause this stinking liquid is rising higher ever second and we can't climb much higher on this altar…"

Jackie put her hands over her eyes. "Stop! I don't want to here any more."

"Oh, but you wait Mum, you won't believe how we escaped."

Jackie did not _want _to hear how they had escaped. Nevertheless, there was not much to do but keep listening.

Rose patted her mother's arm as the Doctor finished the wild tale with a roaring description of how, using the giant hollow mask hanging above the altar as a raft, they had manoeuvred the Diloferin-lions into towing their makeshift boat to safety. Jackie did not applaud when the story was finished. She fixed her features into an expression that (she hoped) was positively furious, sipping her tea with pursed lips and glaring at the Doctor and Rose alternately.

"You know what? I think the two of you have just been sitting in a coffee shop in Scotland for two weeks," she grumbled.

"It's all true!" Rose insisted, nearly knocking her coke off the edge of the table.

"Don't spoil it for me. I want to believe it's not true," Jackie sighed, getting up to pour herself a fresh cup of tea. "I'll tell you one thing, though," she called over her shoulder. "_He_ just likes to hear himself talk. You're never going to get him to stop, Rose, and serve you right."

Later, while the Doctor was at the corner dairy getting chips for tea (like the coke, Rose had demanded it – Jackie wondered if it was all the running for her life that allowed her daughter to keep her figure), Rose turned to her mother over their game of scrabble and asked, "Mum, why were you so glad to see me when we got in? You usually greet me with a whinge about how I don't come home enough."

Jackie shrugged, correcting Rose's spelling of 'machine' on the chequered board. "I get worried, that's all. There's been funny things on the news last week and I kept thinking your man-alien would turn up to investigate. I was just happy you hadn't arrived dished out in laser guns to tell me Britain's infested with Martians again."

"They were Sycoraks, Mum," Rose said as Jackie pondered over her own tiles. "What kind of funny things?"

"Nothing bothersome. Just – five people last week were found with their brains exploded."

"_What?_"

"It's alright, sweetie, it was miles away. Two in Cardiff, then two out in the countryside, and another one across London just a couple of days ago. They said it was like super-advanced mad cow disease had hit them overnight – they were missing for a couple of days, then they'd turn up dead with mush leaking out their ears. Funny business, but if your Doctor's not worried, neither am I."

"Cardiff and now London? You mean they're getting closer?" Rose was staring at her. Jackie tried to give her a reassuring smile.

"I did notice that, Rose. But really, I think it's just a coincidence. There's not been any queer lights in the sky or little green men spotted. How do you spell your TARDIS, then?"

"Tee, aye, are, dee, eye, ess. Are you sure there's nothing suspicious, Mum?" Rose's voice had grown very serious and sharp, as if she was scolding her mother. Jackie felt irritation tickling her. Rose never _used_ to talk to her like she was stupid, not before she met her Doctor fellow. But, she had to suppose, when you listened to someone talk about how clever they were for all your waking hours, you were bound to feel a little superiority had rubbed off on yourself. Jackie thought of Rose's first Doctor compared to this new version – alright, she hadn't approved of the earlier one any better, and he was frightfully brash, but at least he had seemed to think before he spoke: and to Jackie the grass was always greener (or possibly the paintwork was always bluer) on the other side.

"I'm sure, Rose," Jackie answered. "There; I'm beating you by sixty points now. Do you surrender?"

Rose clicked her tongue and shot her mother a look that would have been spiteful if it hadn't been accompanied by a barely-contained smile.

"Alright, you win-"

At that moment, there was a roar and a bang so loud the last consonant of Rose's sentence was lost completely: it sounded as if something had rushed overhead and exploded nearby. But Jackie had felt no vibration, and the windows were not rattling. As if the bang had been all sound and no explosion.

Before Jackie had even processed these thoughts, she realised Rose had left the table and sprinted past her.

"Doctor?" her yell sounded tiny in the aftermath of the bang. Jackie rubbed her ears, realising she had been deafened a little. She pushed herself up and stumbled after her daughter.

"Rose! Do you know what that was?"

But Rose was already exiting the flat. Jackie hurried to catch the door before it swung shut and rushed down the concrete steps to the carpark outside. She saw the glowing blonde puff of Rose's hair already on the street, the streetlights filling up the shadows cast by the last light of the setting sun, running towards a prone figure lying on the sidewalk with a white newspaper packet of chips burst open in the gutter beside him.

"_Doctor!_" Rose's shriek split the air and drove the last of the deafness from Jackie's ears.

"Oh my God," Jackie heard her voice echo in her head as soon as it left her mouth. "Oh my God. Rose, has he been shot? Has someone shot him?"

She was still twenty metres from her daughter and Rose didn't seem to hear her. She was kneeling beside the trench-coated figure, shaking his shoulders wildly. Curious neighbours had left their flats and were silhouetted in lit doorways along the street. A few approached cautiously, a man in tartan slippers and dressing gown, two teenagers that lived in Jackie's block, and the young woman at number 23 carrying her toddler on her hip.

"Did you yell for a doctor? Do you want me to call the ambulance?" the woman with the child asked, addressing the question to Jackie. She was holding a cordless phone in her free hand, her thumb hovering over the '1' button.

"Yes! Someone's been hurt," Jackie called as she dashed to her daughter's side. "Rose, darling, don't shake him, I've heard you shouldn't shake them in case he has a neck injury…"

"I'm not," said Rose helplessly, and Jackie saw that her daughter's hands were hovering over the Doctor. But he was convulsing and jerking all on his own. His expression was blank, his eyes barely closed so that a sliver of white sliver beneath the lids.

"Oh, God," Jackie breathed, putting her hands over her mouth. Distantly, she heard the woman with the toddler talking to the emergency services.

The convulsions became suddenly more violent, but also more conscious; the Doctor thrashed, his fist just missing Rose's face, then clutched his head in his hands, squeezing his eyes shut and crying out. Rose whimpered and grabbed his wrists, seemingly trying to stop him crushing his own skull between his palms.

"Doctor, I'm here," she said, and Jackie knew her daughter was recalling her mother's words from only a few minutes before – '_they'd turn up dead with mush leaking out their ears… they're getting closer…_'

Rose kept speaking, rapidly soothing, "It's alright, help is coming, it's alright," and after a few seconds Jackie saw it seemed to be working: the Doctor's clenched fingers relaxed and his head fell back to the pavement. Rose lowered his arms to his side and took his face in her hands. "Are you awake? Are you there?" His eyes opened, looked up at her and gave her a very familiar, alive, frown.

Jackie realised she had been wringing her hands so tight there were nail marks on her skin. She took a breath and felt her muscles begin to unwind.

"Oh, thank God," Rose gasped, smiling at once. "Are you alright? Is your brain alright? What happened? Was it that bang?"

But the Doctor's frown deepened. He sat up, staring at Rose with his eyes narrowed. He said something, but somehow it came out garbled and Jackie didn't hear what it was.

"Doctor?" Rose repeated. "Are you alright?"

"Rose," the Doctor said to her, then glanced at Jackie. "Jackie."

"Yeah, it's me sweetheart. You gave us a right turn for a second there," Jackie was too relieved to notice she had called the Doctor 'sweetheart'.

Shaking his head as he stared at Rose, he spoke again. At least, he tried to – but once again, all that came out of his mouth was nonsense.

"Is he deaf?" Jackie cried in horror. "He doesn't seem to know what he's saying."

"I don't know. No. He can hear me. Can't you, Doctor? If you can hear me, touch your nose, okay?" Rose begged.

The Doctor continued to stare at her.

The man in the Tartan slippers was standing over Jackie's shoulder. "He can hear you, hon," he grunted at Rose. "I saw him look at yer mum when she made a noise."

"But what's wrong with him?" Rose cried, throwing a desperate look at the man.

"Looks like the fellow's had a stroke. My wife, God rest her, had one a few years back. Scrambled the speech centres of her brain – she had to learn to talk all over again. She used to garble her words just like that," he pointed at the Doctor, who was watching the quickly gathering crowd with interest and possibly a little panic.

"A stroke? Can he get those?" Jackie asked.

"Surely not so young!" one of her neighbours answered her.

"It happens. Too much salt in his diet, no doubt," someone else said.

All heads – including the Doctor's – turned as the sound of a siren entered the street.

"Mum," Rose was clutching the Doctor's hand and looking up at Jackie. "He doesn't understand me. We have to get him inside. He can't go to hospital – they're not going to know how to treat him, for chrissakes!"

"Of course. Yes, if you think it's best," Jackie hurried around to the Doctor's other side, but before she could take his arm and help him to his feet, he jumped up of his own accord and shook Rose's hand. There was real panic on his face now and he was pointing across the street, repeating some word that Jackie knew she wouldn't even be able to pronounce.

"I don't understand!" Rose cried, staring at him and gesturing to try and communicate what she meant. "What is it? What are you saying?"

The Doctor gave a frustrated growl and tried to pull away from her, but the man in the tartan slippers stepped forward and grabbed his elbow. Looking annoyed, the Doctor jerked his arm away, but the two teenagers now gripped his jacket. "Don't go running onto the road, mate, you need a hospital!" one of them said. The ambulance, lights bursting against Jackie's eyes, had pulled up at the curb and two red-striped paramedics jumped out.

"Who's the bloke who's had the seizure?" one of them called.

The Doctor spun around as more neighbours closed in on him, preventing him from escaping to wherever it was he desperately wanted to go.

Rose's voice called out over the crowd, "No, he's alright, I'm just going to take him inside!"

"Don't be stupid, the woman on the phone told us this was serious," one of the paramedics yelled at her as they headed towards the Doctor, who was looking frantically around for an exit.

Rose pushed between the two teenagers and snatched his hand, dragging him back towards the flat. "He's fine, really," she yelled back at the paramedics. Jackie stepped quickly between the medics and the Doctor's retreating back to give Rose enough time to disappear with her companion (ruefully thinking how good at that Rose was). But she heard a gasp run through the crowd and turned to see the Doctor's lean figure stumbling and dropping to the ground once more, even as Rose attempted to hold him upright.

The paramedics sped past her and pushed Rose out of the way. Suddenly a stretcher had materialised beside them and they were hauling her daughter's alien man onto its white sheets and rushing him away towards the back of the ambulance. Rose had her hands pressed to her mouth. The tartan-slippered man was shaking his head without any convincing sympathy. Jackie looked from the Doctor's face vanishing behind the red-crossed doors, skin pale and eyes closed, to Rose's – even paler, but eyes wide open. She put her arms out and pulled Rose into her chest.

"Come on, sweetheart, we'll follow them to the hospital," she shushed. "Come on, Rose. He's going to be alright."

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	2. The Doctor Plays Charades

A/N: Thanks for reviewing, everyone :). Sorry this chapter took so long to write, I was a bit busy as I just got a new job. You're all sweet as pie.

I'm probably warping canon to some horrible extent as my knowledge of old school Doctor Who is limited at best, so please don't hesitate to notify me if I make a huge plot blunder. I need to know now so that I can fix it as soon as possible.

NB: I've sorted the timeline out, so for reference's sake the story is set sometime after the Cybermen episodes but before _Fear Her._ Unfortunately, that means Mickey will not be in it, which makes me exceedingly sad.

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The paramedics called for Rose to come in the ambulance with them. Two of them took her hands and lifted her up into the back of the van, pulling the doors shut behind her with a finalising click. The questions began at once.

"You're the girlfriend? Or sister?"

"Er. The first. Sort of," Rose lied, clutching the door handle as she felt the ambulance roar off down the street. She stared down at the stretcher where the female medic's thin brown fingers were tipping the Doctor's chin upwards to listen to his breathing. She thought, _Have _I _ever touched his chin with that delicacy? I can't remember._

"He's got no history of epilepsy?"

"I don't think so. I haven't known him that long – well, quite a while, but – he's older than me, you see… he was just getting tea and there was a bang…"

"A bang?" the paramedic asking the questions (a blonde man with thick, rough eyebrows) looked up, startled. "Like a gunshot?" He glanced at the woman listening to the Doctor's breathing. "Did you check for blood?"

"All over. Not even a bump on the noggin," the woman answered, raising her head for a moment.

"It was louder than a gun," Rose mumbled.

"Has he complained of anything in recent days? Headaches, pains in his limbs or chest, anything like that?"

She shook her head.

"He was standing up when we got there. Did you notice any muscle weakness? Did he complain of numbness? Possibly only on one side of the body? Partial blindness? Did he have trouble walking? Did he say he was in pain?"

"I couldn't… understand him. His speech was all funny," she explained.

The blonde man frowned. "Sounds suspiciously like a stroke. Does he have a family history of them?"

"I don't know."

"Is he prone to blood clotting? Does he take aspirin when he flies?"

"I don't know," she could have laughed at the question, imagining the Doctor knocking back a few aspirin every time he activated the TARDIS. She vaguely remembered he had said once that he was allergic to aspirin.

"Any of his relatives die of brain or spinal tumours?"

"I don't know."

"What's his name, anyway?"

Rose pressed her knuckles against her closed eyelids and willed herself not to say, '_I don't know.'_ "Peter Harkness," she said quickly. "He's Peter Harkness." It was the best she could muster off the top of her head. She lowered her hands. "Do you know what's wrong? Is there anything you can do for him?"

"He seems pretty stable," the woman paramedic assured her with a smile. "That's all we can tell for now."

The ambulance went over a pothole and Rose had to steady herself against the wall to keep her footing. She suddenly noticed the woman unrolling a wire from a machine by the stretcher and fiddling around under the Doctor's shirt (where Rose _definitely_ hadn't touched delicately). A moment later, the machine began to beep. Rose watched the little green line, waiting for it to double-spike with each beep, but there were only single peaks.

"Heart-rate's plenty strong and steady," the woman paramedic said, presumably trying to be cheery.

Rose was not cheered. The machine was telling her something the paramedic couldn't know: that only one of the Doctor's hearts was working. Rose found herself thinking ruefully, _they must be a lot shoddier than human hearts, if they conk out as often as this - _

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Jackie arrived at the hospital twenty minutes after the ambulance, driven by the woman from number 23 while the teenagers took care of the woman's baby. By that time, Rose had been shunted into a room for people who get in the way of medical practises and the Doctor had been wheeled out of sight.

"He hasn't woken up but they said he hadn't got any worse," Rose told her mother when Jackie asked.

"How long do you think it'll take them to figure out he's not so human on the inside as he looks on the outside?"

"I don't know," Rose sighed, for the nth time.

Her mother patted her hand and went to find a vending machine that made hot drinks. She came back with two steaming cups.

"This is a hot chocolate. You said you'd get me coffee," Rose complained.

"And have you up all night worrying until your hair fell out? Goodness, sweetheart, I'd put sleeping tablets in that cup if I had any. Drink up."

It occurred to Rose after she had downed the hot chocolate that Jackie could easily have bought sleeping tablets in the hospital chemist just around the corner, but by that time she was already feeling too exhausted by the night's events to ask if there had been anything in her drink.

Rose was woken by Jackie shaking her shoulder. She jerked upright, asking, "How long did I sleep?"

"Couple of hours, honey. Come on, the doctor wants us to go with him." Jackie was standing over her, holding her hand.

"He's awake? He's talking normally?" Rose said, jumping to her feet.

"No, Rose, I mean the other doctor. Dr Mitchell," she indicted a ginger-haired man hovering in the doorway nearby.

Rose's stomach, briefly leaping into her mouth, plummeted back into her abdomen. She let Jackie lead her through the maze of carpeted corridors.

"Peter is awake, but he doesn't seem to be responding. It's possible he's suffering from memory loss and substantial confusion. He's asked for you by name several times, so we were hoping you could get him talking." Dr Mitchell told Rose as they walked.

"Peter?" Jackie asked. "No, we're not here to see a Peter, we're here…"

"Mum, he means Peter Harkness, my _boyfriend_," Rose said firmly, nudging Jackie's arm. She gave Dr Mitchell a smile, "Mum never knows him as Peter, we all call him… er… Doc. Just a nickname, you know."

"Of course, yes. Might that be why he didn't respond to Peter?" Dr Mitchell asked.

"Probably."

Dr Mitchell showed them into a yellow-walled ward with one bed, occupied by her Doctor. He was sitting upright, his eyes open and his hands linked together on his lap. He threw them open when his gaze met hers.

"Rose!" he cried. She couldn't stop herself sprinting to the bedside and embracing him.

"Thank God, Doctor, you don't know how scared I was." She said into the collar of his hospital-supplied gown. "I had this vision of you dying on the street there right outside my flat and I was trying to remember all the things from your regeneration last time but I couldn't remember what type of _tea_ it was, I know that's stupid, but I was so scared I wouldn't be able to give you the right tea and you wouldn't make it through the regeneration…"

She pulled back a little to look at his face. It was staring at her blankly.

"Er," Dr Mitchell's voice interrupted her confusion. "I don't think he understands anything we say. Peter? Do you understand me?"

The Doctor looked at the doctor. Blankly.

"If the stroke has closed blood flow to Broca's or Wernicke's areas of the brain, speech comprehension can be affected. He hasn't said a word since he woke up, apart from your name," Mitchell explained. "You are Rose Tyler, aren't you?"

"Doctor?" Rose asked the Doctor.

"Yes?" asked Dr Mitchell.

"I was talking to _him_." Rose said.

"Oh. Is he a Doctor?"

"Yes. Of… er… anthropology," Rose invented.

"Rose," said the Doctor's voice again. He shook her arm until she looked at him again. He started making a gesture with his hands, forming a triangle with his fingers then a box-shape between his hands. He'd point to his head, make the triangle-box, and then wave his arms about frantically.

"What's he doing? Charades?" Jackie asked.

The Doctor continued to gesture at them. He pointed at Rose's jeans, made the box shape, cupped his hands over his mouth and made a droning noise, waved his hands at the sky, tapped his wrist, and finally gave a cry of frustration and stopped.

"What?" said Rose, frowning.

"Is he talking about a house?" Jackie asked.

"No, I think it was a plane," guessed Dr Mitchell. "Or maybe a hot air balloon?"

"He wanted to know the time," said Jackie.

"It's half past eleven," Dr Mitchell said glancing at his own watch.

The Doctor was staring at Dr Mitchell. Suddenly he threw back the covers of his bed and slid off onto the floor, launching himself at the poor man and grabbing the front of his shirt. Dr Mitchell stumbled back in alarm, but the Doctor emerged clutching the thick black marker-pen he'd snatched from the man's breast pocket. He ripped off the cap and looked around for a piece of paper. There wasn't anything in sight. The Doctor, hospital gown tangling around his calves, went to the blank wall and began to draw.

"Hey! Hey, stop him, that's permanent marker!" Dr Mitchell cried. Rose, Jackie and the Doctor all ignored him.

Rose could not believe how fast his hand was moving. Metre-long lines so straight they could have been done by a ruler appeared in black ink on the wall as the Doctor's drawing took shape. At last he drew back so Rose could see the drawing taking up a large portion of the wall.

"The TARDIS! It's the TARDIS," Rose cried. The diagram was a perfect representation, except for the letters of POLICE BOX, which were only a meaningless scrawl. The Doctor beamed at her. Rose laughed, "TARDIS," she repeated, and made the droning sound again – the sound she hadn't recognised as the ship vanishing or appearing.

"T-ar-dis," the Doctor echoed. He seemed to be learning the word for the first time. He lifted the pen and drew another quick sketch beside the picture of the TARDIS.

"What's that supposed to be?" Rose frowned.

"It's a stick figure, sweetheart," said Jackie. "It's supposed to be a person."

"Oh."

The Doctor pointed at himself, then at the stick figure.

"It's him. Doctor, TARDIS," Rose said, as if desperate to memorise the two pictures. She nodded at the Doctor and gestured for him to continue.

His hand slid in violent jerks across the wall. Stylised lightening-bolts now joined the head of the stick figure to the top of the TARDIS.

"What on earth?" Jackie wrinkled her nose. "His machine struck him with lightening?"

"No, that can't be it, we landed the TARDIS a mile away from your flat," Rose said, shaking her head. She looked at the Doctor. He was gesturing to his head, then to the TARDIS. She stared at him in confusion. He closed his eyes and put his fingers to his temples. For a moment she thought that he had given up and was massaging his head in a signal of frustration. Then she realised…

"His link to the TARDIS. That's what the lightening is, Mum, it's his telepathic link to the ship!" She nodded at Jackie and waved at the Doctor to show she understood. He grinned at her and, clutching the black pen in his fist like a knife, stabbed at the lightening he had drawn, scribbling ink over it until the wall was a mess of black lines like a cartoon storm-cloud.

"His link to the TARDIS has been broken," Rose sighed in comprehension. She nodded fervently at the Doctor. "I understand! That's why he can't talk, why he doesn't know what we're saying – Mum, the TARDIS translates everything for him. The link is broken, so he can't speak English any more. Of course!"

She ran to the Doctor and threw her arms around him again, just for good measure. "I see, I see! How do we fix it? What do I have to do?"

The Doctor drew another stick figure on the wall, with an arrow joining it to the TARDIS. He pointed at Rose, then the two stick figures.

"We have to go to the TARDIS?" she asked, then realised that of course, he couldn't understand. "Well, I could have figured that one out myself. Come on, let's go," she saw the Doctor's coat on the back of a nearby chair and grabbed it. "I've got a couple of quid, we can take the bus. It's not too far," she was clinging to the Doctor's hand and leading him towards the door when her way was blocked by Dr Mitchell.

"You can't leave the hospital," the ginger-haired man panted.

"Try and stop me," said Rose.

"This man's just had a stroke! He could be bleeding into his brain. We have to remove any blood clots before they cause more damage! He could die, don't you understand?"

"He'll be fine, don't worry," Rose snapped, trying to push past. Then she saw that there were two burly nurses waiting outside the door. "Oh."

The Doctor let go of her hand. His eyes were dispirited and he gestured for her to go.

"Alright," Rose grumbled. "You stay here," she pointed at the Doctor, then at the bed. "Mum will stay with you. I'll go to the TARDIS."

She held up her copy of the TARDIS door key. "What do I do when I get there?"

The Doctor, who could not have answered even if he had understood the question, shook his head at her and sat down helplessly on the end of the bed.

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Gone.

Rose stood on the school netball court where she had last seen the Doctor's big blue box. In the darkness, the cold concrete seemed to be seeping up through her shoes, rooting her to this spot as if she was made of concrete as well.

Gone.

When they had arrived that afternoon, terrifying a flock of sparrows as the ship hummed into existence, Rose had burst out of the TARDIS in front of the Doctor. She had been so eager to see her Mum that she hadn't even glanced back at the blue box as they crossed the road and the sight of the TARDIS was lost around the first corner.

And now it was gone.

Rose's feet came unstuck from the concrete and she stumbled towards the brick wall lining the edge of the playground, fumbling its surface desperately, perhaps hoping to find the TARDIS' chameleon circuit repaired and active. "Are you there?" she heard herself calling, "TARDIS, are you hiding? Did you move yourself?" God that sounded stupid. Panic strangling her throat, she wrenched the key out of her pocket and held it up like a sword pulled from a stone. Perhaps it would be glowing, like when they were in the church in 1987 and the reapers had come…

It wasn't glowing. It wasn't even warm. Just an ordinary, stupid, useless key that didn't even belong to any door on earth.

"Glow, damn you!" Rose yelled.

"Oi, you there! What you up to?" a craggy voice cried. A yellowish torch beam pinned Rose guiltily to the brick wall as the school caretaker, a tubby old man in a fisherman's hat, hobbled across the yard towards her.

Rose clutched the key to her chest and tried to smile in a friendly manner. "Sorry, just looking for something I dropped," she called to him, raising her hand.

"Looking for something? Looking for something?" the caretaker growled, lowering his torch. "You're looking for trouble is what you're looking for. Are you drunk or something? You better not be one of those bloody students who keep pulling up my saplings."

"I'm not, honestly," Rose replied. She wondered how drunk she would sound if she asked the caretaker whether he had seen a blue telephone box wandering around near here.

"You get out of here before I call the police on you for trespassing," the caretaker snapped at her. "Go on, get."

Rose got. She stuck her hands in her pockets and walked as fast as she could towards the bus stop, pointedly climbing over the school fence instead of using the gate in the hope that it would annoy the caretaker. With each step, she felt a little bit sicker at the thought of telling the Doctor that the TARDIS was gone.

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Jackie was waiting for her outside the hospital with the woman from number 23, who had arrived to pick Jackie up. They were both getting very tired and irritable.

"We've been waiting for an hour, Rose. You said you'd be back ages ago," Jackie grumbled.

"Sorry. Had to take the last bus of the night."

"Well why didn't you just stay there? They've kicked us out of the hospital, you might as well have gone home," Jackie kept up her complaints as she and the woman from number 23 headed towards a car parked nearby.

Rose looked up in horror at the towering hospital building. "Kicked us out? But I have to talk to the Doctor!"

"Which one? _Your_ Doctor still can't form a sentence and Dr Mitchell has gone to bed like a sensible person," Jackie answered, beckoning to her. "Come on, Rose, you can see him again in the morning."

"We can't leave him there! What if they start trying to treat him with drugs or something? We don't know what he's allergic to. And Mum, the TARDIS has disappeared. There's those people whose brains were melted. Something terrible is going to happen and the Doctor can't help us in the state he's in!" She realised her voice was rising to a squeak.

Jackie paused, half-in and half-out of the car. She sighed, got out and took Rose's hand gently. "Sweetheart, it isn't as if this sort of thing doesn't happen _often_ around here."

--------------------------------

The two of them bussed to the hospital first thing the next morning. Jackie had wanted to stay behind, until Rose phoned ahead first and was told that there'd been "an incident" and someone would be waiting for her when she got there. Rose hoped the person waiting for her was medically trained, because she was worried that she was going to pass out thinking about all the things that might have happened to the Doctor.

"He's died. I know it. He's died and I'm going to have to explain to them how their patient came back to life on the autopsy table," Rose muttered during the entire bus trip.

"Don't be silly, they would've told you over the phone if he'd died," Jackie soothed.

A tall, gangly, blonde nurse met them at reception. "I'm Albert. I've been supervising Mr Harkness since last night," he said brightly, shaking Rose's hand. It took Rose several seconds to remember that Mr Harkness was the Doctor.

"Has he… has he gotten worse?" she asked, the words coming out as a whisper.

"Pardon? Oh, no, not at all," Albert beamed. "Didn't they tell you? He escaped."

Albert explained the story to them as they took the elevator up the fourth floor. The nurse seemed to think it was all exceedingly funny. "The moment they left him alone in the room, he was out the window," he chuckled. "Four stories up – he climbed down the window sills and dropped the last storey onto the roof of a parked ambulance. Luckily someone saw him go and we caught him before he'd left the parking lot. I've never seen a man with a stroke run so fast."

"But he's alright?" Rose asked, her fear draining away.

"Quite alright. Perfectly healthy, apart from his brain not working properly, of course. We're taking him for an MRI scan now – we were rather hoping you'd help us with that. He won't do anything we say."

"Well of course he won't," Jackie snapped, her arms folded. "He can't understand you!"

The lift doors opened and they stepped out onto the fourth floor. Albert glanced back at them as he directed them towards a small crowd gathered around the ward where Rose had last seen the Doctor.

"It's rather worse than that," explained Albert. "He's somehow managed to barricade himself in his room."

Apparently, even though the Doctor's clothes and belongings had been locked up for security, he had somehow convinced someone to bring him the sonic screwdriver. No one had been able to get into the room since then. None of the keys would open it, and a locksmith called up from his shop along the street was still struggling with it when Rose, Jackie and Albert arrived.

"Oh, thank goodness," Dr Mitchell gasped when he saw Rose. "Miss Tyler, this is getting ridiculous! I'm on the verge of asking them to break the door down!"

"I don't know what he's done to the lock, but seems to be totally mangled," the locksmith added. "I doubt he'll be able to get it open again if he wanted to."

"He will," Rose sighed. He pressed her ear to the door, and then knocked. "Doctor? I mean… Peter? It's Rose. Can you open up?"

There was a pause, then a muffled voice called. "Rose?"

"Yes, Rose," she repeated. "Rose and Jackie. Can you open the door, Doctor?" she rattled the handle to illustrate her request.

Another pause, then Rose heard the hum of the sonic screwdriver and felt the doorknob vibrate under her hand. Before she could turn it, the door was thrown open.

"Rose!" the Doctor grinned at her. He was leaning on the doorframe, still dressed in the hospital gown, twirling the sonic screwdriver in one hand. He took in the crowd peering over Rose's shoulder.

"He-llo Albert," he said, "He-llo Jackie. Dr Mitchell."

"You can talk!" Rose's jaw dropped.

Albert, who was leaning over her left shoulder, shook his head. "Unfortunately not. He seems to have learned a few words since you saw him last, but he's definitely learning them, not regaining his ability to speak."

"It's impossible," said Dr Mitchell, speaking to Jackie because Rose was busy trying to convince the Doctor to give her the sonic screwdriver. "Stroke victims haven't lost their memory, they've lost the ability to process language. It's impossible for him to just _learn_ words."

Rose remembered why she had needed to talk to the Doctor so urgently. 'The TARDIS has disappeared," she croaked.

He cocked his head at her, oblivious to the catastrophe of her statement. She pushed him back inside the room. Then she stopped and stared.

It was filled with drawings. Rose gaped. The walls, previously a crisp colour like the inside of a lemon rind, were now scarred with a million black lines. There were pictures of earth viewed from above, pictures of continents with wobbly arrows scrawled across them, pictures of fruits, pictures of animals, pictures of people, pictures of people doing numerous different activities, messy lines of alphabet, patterns and shapes like a wallpaper catalogue, even pictures that didn't seem to be of anything at all. The drawings spilled onto the ceiling and drifted along the skirting board, clustered against the cupboard and were even prominent on the glass of the window.

Rose noticed that the Doctor was still holding the black marker he had stolen from Dr Mitchell the night before. Her eyes ranged over the drawings. "You did all this?"

"Some of it was me," said Albert's voice. Rose looked at him as he raised his hand sheepishly in the doorway. "I was teaching him words. He learns fast."

"Wow," said Rose. The sketch of the TARDIS, the largest drawing in the room, glared out at her. She gulped. "Doctor," she grabbed his arm to make sure he was looking at her and not admiring his drawings. "The TARDIS," she pointed at the wall, "Is gone," she made a cutting movement with both hands.

He looked at her, sighed, and nodded. Pointed at himself, then at his head, then at the TARDIS, then made her cutting movement again. He was saying, _Yes, I thought the TARDIS would be gone._

Rose felt her stomach curl a little. But at least he knew. Perhaps that meant he could bring it back – he'd brought it back before, hadn't he? With the TARDIS key? It could be done.

Before she had time to try to explain this to the Doctor, Dr Mitchell appeared at her left.

"We need to take him for his MRI," he said in a low and frustrated voice. "To find the blood clot and the extent of the damage to his brain. He's already an hour late."

The Doctor was watching Mitchell with one eyebrow raised, evidently aware that he was being ordered to do something.

"I don't think he wants to have an MRI-thing," Rose said sweetly to Dr Mitchell.

"Then tell him that it's for his own good, and if he doesn't cooperate I will call psychiatrics and have him sedated," Dr Mitchell replied, just as sweetly.

"Tell him yourself!" snapped Rose. Dr Mitchell looked affronted, glancing at the crowd who was watching and listening in the doorway. Rose realised he was too embarrassed to play the charades game.

She tried to explain to the Doctor what Mitchell had said, miming an injection in her arm and sleeping to explain sedative. The Doctor nodded. He pointed at Dr Mitchell, held up one finger, mimed the injection, and then made a very ambiguous gesture.

"What? What did he say?" Mitchell frowned.

"I think," said Rose, trying to smile. "He was making a non-specific threat of some kind. Possibly the violent kind. Possibly not. It was non-specific."

Dr Mitchell glared. He turned to Albert. "Fine, then. I want to know the exact details of this non-specific threat," and snapped his fingers.

"Sorry," Albert muttered, stepping forward and uncapping a hypodermic needle.

------------------------------


	3. Interlude in the MRI

Yeah, yeah, I know this took a while to write. I've been working fulltime for the last week and now the relatives have arrived for Christmas on top of all that. Bear with me, I'll try to write the next one a bit faster.

NB: I thought I'd state my references for the whole translator-not-working thing. The fact being that my only reference is _Christmas Invasion_: if you remember, it stops working while the Doctor is comatose due to regeneration troubles, and only starts up again when he regains consciousness. I'm sure there's loads of old-school canon to dispute this incident and I'll gladly listen if you'll direct me to it :), but I may still choose to use new-canon over old-canon. Not out of disrespect, just for convenience's sake.

--------------------------------

In the lemon-rind-yellow corridor outside the door to the room labelled MRI 2, Rose Tyler folded her arms, looked up at the gangly blonde nurse and said.

"Albert, _let me in._"

Albert clasped his hands like a bouncer at a rock concert and sternly avoided her gaze.

"Albert, _let me into that room._"

"Look, I can't, ok? I really can't," Albert hissed, glancing up and down the corridor as if he was afraid he would be disciplined merely for talking to someone as disruptive as Rose. "I could barely convince them not to throw you both out of the front doors as it is."

"Throw us out?" Jackie shrieked at him, making the young nurse wince. "For trying to take bloody care of our bloody friend? This ain't a hospital, it's a bloody nutter institution!"

"Albert, _let me in_," Rose said through gritted teeth. "Or I tell you my Mum will break the door down herself."

It had taken three doses of the sedative and four nurses to knock the Doctor unconscious so that he could be taken for examination. Granted, one of the nurses had been involved in holding Rose back, hence why she was currently banned from entering the MRI room. Dr Mitchell had apologised to her profusely about the use of force (from a safe distance, of course) yet had still not relented to her protests.

"Albert, I promise you, I will not cause trouble, I will not try to hit anybody, I just need to know what they are doing to him. They don't understand the damage they could cause to his brain with their drugs and their sonar beams or – or whatever."

The blonde nurse shook his head, still not meeting Rose's eyes. "Mitchell is a professional neurologist, Rose," he said firmly. "I think he knows what he's doing with brains."

"Human brains, may_be!_" Jackie spat.

"What's that supposed to mean?" frowned Albert.

"Mum, hush up. Albert, _please_," Rose raised her hands in supplication. "_Please_ let me in. You said yourself that you'd never seen somebody take two doses of that sedative and keep kicking – can't you understand that this is not your usual patient? I _have_ to be there."

Albert looked over his shoulder at the door, silently considering it for a moment. He sighed, glared at Rose and reached for the handle. Before he opened the door, he put his hand on Rose's shoulder.

"You don't move more than a foot away from me, okay?" he growled.

Rose nodded and let him escort her through into room beyond.

It was dim, filled with the whirr of computers and the ethereal quiet of chugging brains. Dr Mitchell, one of his colleagues and a young woman with a clipboard were bent over a row of screens displaying what Rose had to assume were rapidly emerging pictures of the Doctor's cranium. Through a glass window, an enormous white tube could be seen, the Doctor's bare feet and torso lying as if he was a corpse at a funeral.

Dr Mitchell looked over his shoulder long enough to shoot Rose a disapproving glare, then the other neurologist raised his hand.

"Mitchell, look at this…"

Both of them bent over the screen.

"…what on Earth?"

"What's that line?"

"Why is there no division between the two hemispheres, here?"

"Where's his frontal lobe?"

Rose glanced at Albert, whose brows were furrowed. The two neurologists were sporadically fiddling with the settings on the computer, trying to fix the impossible information they were being given. Dr Mitchell told the woman with the clipboard to go in and check that he hadn't moved during the scan.

"You see?" Hissed Rose to Albert. "I tried to explain. He's not normal. They don't know what they're doing. Can't you convince them to let him out of the hospital?"

Albert didn't reply. Rose realised he wasn't even listening. His mouth was hanging open a little as he stared at the images on the computer screen.

"But that's… that doesn't even look _mammalian_," he muttered.

Rose balled her fists, wanting to shriek from frustration. Every second the Doctor remained in this building was another second these people found out more about him. Everything more they found out about him would make them want to keep him in their clutches. Rose knew their intentions were good, but they couldn't really understand – and worse than that, if they decided he wasn't human, their thoughts would leap to the other aliens London had witnessed in recent times, the Sycoraks, the Slitheen in their human skins… she doubted that alone she could convince them that this alien was reasonably friendly, if not _completely_ harmless.

"Albert," she said, shaking the nurse's shoulder. He brushed her hand off, drawing nearer to the computer screen as if hypnotised. Rose grabbed his jaw and forced him to look at her. "Albert, make them let him go."

Inside the MRI room, the woman who had gone to check on the Doctor leaned down, then straightened up very suddenly.

"Dr Mitchell?" she yelled, voice muffled to almost nothing by the glass wall between them. "His heart's gone into fibrillation."

"What? Did she just say…?" the other neurologist looked at Dr Mitchell.

"Christ!" Dr Mitchell leaped to his feet as if someone had pinched him. "Get him out. He must have had a reaction to the sedative."

Rose buried her face in her hands and wished very hard for a large mallet with which to violently create a solution out of this mess, and perhaps a strong cup of coffee for herself. Neither appeared. She took a deep breath and, after a moment's hesitation, began explaining to Dr Mitchell about the two hearts.

He didn't believe her, of course. Possibly he didn't even hear her. He was telling the woman with the clipboard to call for a defibrillator.

"What's a defibre-thing?" Rose asked Albert.

"You know in the movies when they bring people back to life by electrocuting them?" Albert demonstrated with a loud zapping noise. "It's one of those. Only it doesn't really bring people back to life."

Rose felt herself pale. Bloody _hell_. This was getting ridiculous. She turned back to Dr Mitchell.

"Doctor," she hissed, thinking to herself how practised she was at saying that. "He doesn't have that fibro-watsit. _He has two hearts_."

"Albert, please take Miss Tyler downstairs," Dr Mitchell called, beckoning to the nurse.

Albert shuffled forward. Rose glared at him and he didn't come any closer.

"This explains the stroke," Dr Mitchell said to the other neurologist. "Irregular heart rhythms often result in blood clots. I should have checked him last night. Albert, we need a dose of warfarin to thin the blood."

Before she could think twice about what she was doing, Rose grabbed Dr Mitchell's hand and clasped it between her own. She felt like a stupid little girl doing it, but finally she had his attention. "Look at his brain." She said. "Look at his symptoms. You just said they're impossible. Please do one of your scan-thingies of his chest and you'll see, I'm _telling_ you, _this is a perfectly normal heart beat for him_."

At last he paused and considered what she was saying. "How do you know?"

"He was born like that. He told me. He's a doctor too, remember?"

Dr Mitchell was silent, inwardly struggling between the logical and the impossible. He chewed on the inside of his cheek and glanced at the other neurologist, who shrugged helplessly. Then he ran his hand through his thinning ginger hair and sighed.

"Let's take a look at his chest," he said.

-------------------------------------


	4. The Newspaper Scandal

I'm afraid it's another short chapter. You fine folks deserve better. Happy new years'!

----------------------------

Rose was exhausted, and it wasn't even lunchtime yet.

She'd spent all morning making up reasons for the Doctor's inhuman anatomy. She had convinced Dr Mitchell that drugs that might not be dangerous for humans could well do serious harm to his patient, but beyond that she hadn't had much luck. He didn't believe her when she said the abnormalities were probably natural mutation, and he definitely didn't believe her when she changed tact and pretended that the Doctor had been the result of a genetic experiment by the government.

"And you're going to have tell us his real name sometime, Miss Tyler," frowned the ginger-haired doctor as they sat across from each other on either side of the bed where the Doctor now lay, still in a deep sedative-induced sleep. "This Peter Harkness has no medical records – and the only birth certificates we have showing such a name are for two men, one sixty-seven years old and the other only a child."

"It's because of the genetic experiments, see," Rose smiled, enjoying herself just a little. "M16 erased his identity after he escaped their top-secret laboratory in Wales. That was to prevent him donating one of his hearts to a child in London with terminal heart-cancer."

"I've never heard of a child in London with terminal heart-cancer," Dr Mitchell muttered angrily, going a little pink. He was about to say something angrier, but was interrupted by a polite knock on the door. A moment later, it opened and a man in a white coat strode inside.

Rose felt something fizzle in the back of her brain. The man flicked a lock of black hair off his forehead, nodded the chiselled features of his face at the two of them and took the spare seat.

"Hi," he said in a cocky American accent, holding out his hand. "You must be Miss Tyler, my patient's only next-of-kin," he flashed her a grin.

Dr Mitchell waved his hand at the new arrival as he flicked through the Doctor's chart. "Rose, this is Dr Mike Zellaby. He's a top cardiologist who's just arrived from another hospital on the other side of town. He specialises in rare heart disorders."

"Mike?" Rose wondered faintly. "Jack. You're Jack."

"I beg your pardon?" Dr Zellaby said, sounding more curious than annoyed.

"Jack. I know you, Jack, I _know_ you!" Rose was on the verge of laughing.

"Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I feel you've got yourself mixed up," he said, patting her hand in a way that could not possibly be interpreted as anything other than flirtatious.

Rose's stunned jubilation began to wilt. "Yes. Jack is about a hundred miles above us and hundred thousand years from now," she murmured, then shook her head. Now she looked at the man properly, she could see he wasn't Jack. He was older, a little grey around the temples, his teeth a little more uneven. "Sorry, yeah, I must have made a mistake."

"Fair enough. Dazzled by me, no doubt," he chuckled.

"What's with the accent, then?" she demanded, feeling sickly and embarrassed now. "You're American like Jack."

"Ah, well, you know," he said, taking the papers that Dr Mitchell was holding out. "I'm new to the UK."

He didn't meet her eyes until Dr Mitchell started talking again.

"Now, Rose, I really think we can be sensible about all this. Visiting hours have been over for some time now. Would you be so kind as to see yourself out?"

Rose had to tear her eyes away from the Jack-lookalike to answer Mitchell. "Okay," she said. "Okay, just so long as you don't administer so much as a cough-lolly to the Doc-… to Peter unless you get my permission first, yeah?"

---------------------------------------------

Ten minutes ago, they would have had to drag her away from the Doctor's bedside. But with Dr Zellaby sitting here, watching over her sleeping time lord, she felt safer. Maybe he wasn't Jack, but he seemed friendlier than Dr Mitchell, at any rate. She got up and, with a last glance back at where Mitchell and Zellaby were glancing over an ultrasound of the Doctor's chest, left the ward.

Jackie was waiting for her in the foyer downstairs. Rose went to get them each a polystyrene cup of hot tea from the machine by the gift shop. As she passed the display table loaded with crime novels and plushie teddy bears, a rack of newspapers caught her eye. Cradling the two cups against her chest with one hand, she bent down and picked up the top paper.

MYSTERY ILLNESS OR MURDER? Read the headline halfway down the page. Rose stared at the photograph printed below it. It showed a blurry face that had been half cut off by the frame of the camera. It was – no it _couldn't_ be – but it _was_. The Doctor.

Rose, too tired to feel panicked, scanned through the article as quickly as she could.

"…_The sixth victim was found last night a few hours west of London. Police have admitted the possibility that the six deaths by unknown causes may not be, as initially believed, the product of a virus resulting in the liquefaction of brain tissue, but homicide cases. After autopsies revealed an unidentified toxin in the victims' blood, police last night released this photograph, taken on one of the female victim's cameras after she disappeared while walking home four days ago, her body found lying in a public park over 48 hours later. The victim's family do not recognise the man in the photograph, and he appears to be wearing the shirt and coat that the victim died in. Police fear they are seeing the work of a serial killer who abducts his victims before poisoning them and transporting the bodies up to a hundred miles. Though there is no sign of sexual assault, police say that the unusual and consistent manner of killing and the evidence that the murderer wears victims' clothing suggests that they are dealing with a highly determined, and possibly mentally unstable, individual. They ask that anyone who can identify the man in the picture come forward with any information."_

The article went on to describe the victims and discuss a few harassed quotes gleaned from their families. Rose, her eyes drifting in and out of focus as she stared at the photograph of the Doctor, tried to make a cohesive plan out of her thoughts. She put the cups of tea down on the table and hurried up to the cashier.

"How many people have bought copies of this newspaper?" she snapped, slamming it down on the counter

The man serving – a rotund, bald fellow wearing a hand-knitted jersey – looked at her blankly. "It's one o'clock, hun. Quite a few."

"What about doctors and nurses? How many hospital workers have bought copies?"

"Not many. Mostly the visitors," he shrugged, pushing his spectacles up his nose. "You okay? You're pale as a sheet."

"I'll take all the copies you have in stock," said Rose.

He raised one eyebrow. "This the sort of thing I shouldn't ask questions about?"

"Yes. How much?" Rose dug deep to empty the last notes from her wallet. When she got back to Jackie, carrying two plastic bags full of newspapers and no tea, she grimly showed her mother the photo on the front page.

"I _knew_," Jackie cried. "I _knew_ as soon as I heard about those people that you and your fellow would turn up soon. Didn't I say so? I just didn't think _he'd_ be the one who was offing them!"

"He's not the murderer, Mum," Rose groaned, kicking at the bags. "We got to Earth days after the first killings."

"His picture's right there. He's bonkers, sweetheart. You should go show Dr Mitchell right now," Jackie was reading through the article with a look of hunger on her face. "Listen to this dead girl's poor brother. She sounds like she was lovely, and he blimmin' killed her."

Rose flopped down onto the seat beside her mother and tipped her head back. " Mum, it says the sixth victim disappeared late last night. _After_ they brought the Doctor into the hospital. He was passed out on a stretcher the whole time, he couldn't possibly have killed her."

"What's he got a bloody time machine for, if not for creating convenient alibis?" Jackie countered. "Anyway, I don't know why you wasted all this money on the papers, Rose. The photograph is going to be all over the TV tonight, I'll bet you anything."

Rose knew she was right. But maybe she'd at least bought a few more hours of time before the police came to question the impossible-to-question Doctor. She pushed herself to her feet and picked up the bags full of papers.

"Come on, Mum. I'll dump these in a bin somewhere on the way home. I've got to find the TARDIS before things get any worse. If that's possible at this stage."

----------------------------


	5. Rose plans and scans for alien tech

Thanks for everyone's lovely comments. I'll try to get the updates out a tad quicker from now on; I've just been exceedingly lazy so far. Though I'm back to work on Monday so that isn't exactly going to help. Oh, stuff it all, I'll go at my own blimmin' pace.

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The Doctor was frustrated.

It doesn't really need to be said that he would be frustrated: it should probably be pretty obvious that any man – or Time Lord – who is stuck in a hospital bed without any means of verbal communication is going to get pretty frustrated pretty quickly. Most _especially_ a Time Lord who prefers to use words instead of any other type of weapon.

The Doctor wanted to get up and wander around a bit. He thought he could probably pick the archaic lock on the door even without the sonic screwdriver. He would then have gone looking for the tall blonde man, Albert, to see if he could get another permanent marker. He couldn't say much to anyone without that permanent marker. Then he probably would have made a run for it while Albert wasn't looking.

That's what he would have done – if not for the darn _handcuffs_.

Dr Mitchell, the ginger-haired man, seemed to have organised them. It seemed that he was afraid to give the Doctor any more sedatives, which was a good thing at first sight. But instead of sedatives, the handcuffs kept the Doctor's right wrist very firmly chained to the bed. The Doctor rattled the handcuffs for the nth time and sighed.

He wished Rose would come back with his sonic screwdriver so he could get rid of the handcuffs. He wasn't even sure why she had taken the sonic screwdriver in the first place. She didn't have more use for it than _he_ did, did she? What was she going to do beyond open doors that were of no use to him? Maybe she'd remember which setting reattached barbed wire. Then she could fix a broken tiger cage at the zoo or something and save children. Good for her. The Doctor rattled the handcuffs harder.

Rose. It was the oddest feeling, being able to remember the word _Rose_ and the person connected to the name, but not any linguistic relationship with the word. Where did it go in a sentence? "Rose is in a TARDIS". He knew how to say that in Gallifreyan – it took six verbs and a clever manipulation of the preposition to indicate that the person called Rose was not a Time Lord. But he could not, for the life of him, have grasped the simple sentence "Rose is in a TARDIS" in English. Besides all that, he did not even remember the language he wanted to speak was _called_ "English".

Rose. The word had another meaning besides "that blonde girl currently living on my ship and frequently getting captured, providing me with an exciting new adventure for the day as well as some nice eye candy when an adventure fails to precipitate". It also meant something plant-y. His brain had subconsciously learned that much and remembered it even without a translator. Rose must be a type of flower, he decided, because humans liked flowers and Jackie probably wouldn't have named her daughter "asparagus", which was a type of vegetable whose name the Doctor didn't remember without the translator, though he knew what it tasted like. Or maybe Rose was a type of tree? Would Jackie name her daughter after a tree?

The Doctor rattled the handcuffs yet again. There wasn't much else to do. He _really_ wished Rose would come back with the sonic screwdriver. Seriously, what was she planning to do with it that he couldn't have done much better and faster if he'd been free?

He felt bad for feeling so annoyed at Rose. He realised that he was only focusing his anger on Rose because if he went back to thinking about the TARDIS he'd probably want to smother himself with a pillow.

Because she wasn't there. In his head. The TARDIS was gone from his head and Rose had said she was gone from the school near Powell Estate as well. Which meant that she was probably gone from Earth. Gone from the twenty-first century. Gone from all time and all space the way that his people were gone. There was no way his precious, beautiful, rackety old ship could still be within a thousand miles or a thousand years of his bed: if she was, he'd have known.

The TARDIS was _gone_.

The Doctor realised he had picked up a pillow with his free hand. He quickly put it back on the bed and rolled onto his side, trying to remember what the English word "Doctor" meant in Gallifreyan.

-------------------------------------

Rose had worked out her plan on the bus on the way home.

The plan was to do a scan for alien tech with the sonic screwdriver, find the TARDIS, go back to the hospital before the 6 o'clock news, sneak the Doctor out with the help of Dr Zellaby (who Rose was certain would be on her side, because how could someone who looked like Jack _not_ be on her side?) and escape into the great abyss of time and space before anyone on Earth knew what had happened. Well, Jackie would know what had happened, but before anyone _else_ knew what had happened. Especially the police.

That was plan A. Plan B differed only in its notable absence of TARDIS. Plan B was to go back to the hospital before the 6 o'clock news, sneak the Doctor out with the help of Dr Zellaby and escape into the great abyss of the London subway system. She wouldn't be able to take him home to her mother's flat because that was almost certainly the first place the police would look. She'd only chosen the subway because she figured once she was down there, she'd think of somewhere better to go.

Plan C was… well, to go back to the hospital. Whenever possible.

Right. Now she had to figure out how to do a scan for alien tech.

Half an hour later, Jackie was in the living room watching a soap on the TV when she heard her daughter shout down the hall. "Mum! I'm going to the library!"

"Why?" Jackie replied, also at the top of her voice.

"Internet. They got computers there, don't they?"

"Oh. Well, I suppose so. Is this something to do with _him_?"

"Yeah." Rose called, pulling on her jacket and wondering if she had to bring her library card, which had not been updated for some years and was probably still a children's membership. "I can't figure out how to work his bloody screwdriver."

Jackie turned down the sound on the TV and leaned forward to display her disapproval face. "Alright, sweetheart. Just don't get eaten or anything."

"By _books?_"

Jackie glared. "As far as I've seen, it probably happens."

----------------------------------------------

Once she'd reached the library computers, Rose tried several searches for "Police Box" in combination with "found", "appeared" and "suddenly turned up on my doorstep". There was nothing. Next she tried it simple and searched simply for "blue box".

She had scanned through eight electronic google-pages of meaningless search results when it appeared. She clicked onto a link to some schoolboy's crudely constructed blog. The top entry was garble about the kid's band. Rose scrolled down and the heading of the next entry sprung out: "W T F!! our scool is nutz!!!"

Below it was a photograph of a blue police box. It was balanced on the sloping roof of a large school hall. A boy in the foreground was pointing at it as he glanced back at the camera; closer to the hall was a small cluster of students scattered with teachers, craning their necks to look up at the roof.

Rose felt a wonderful joy sweep through her. She clicked on the entry, which was dated that very morning, and read the text that appeared: "_lol look wot appeared on the arts centre roof last night!! Mr Price is so angry lol!!! Everyone says it was the seniors pullin a prank but nobody has owned up to it. wtf is that thing…!? a telephone box? srsly where did they even get it!!? haha I hope they can't get it off the roof."_

An old-fashioned police box appearing on a school roof on the same night the TARDIS vanished? No possible way that could be a coincidence. She'd found it.

Rose leaned back in her chair and let out a giggle so high-pitched she frightened a passing librarian into dropping her books.

After a moment of relaxation she realised her problem. She'd found the TARDIS, but where was it? The boy in the photograph was wearing a uniform, but the logo was only a blob of colour and she couldn't see the name of the school anywhere. But on the side of the building were clearly emblazoned the words _McCombs Centre for Performing Arts. _It only took a moment for Rose to enter those words into the search engine, and a minute later the computer spat out the website proudly boasting about a new community building: it was on the same site as a school displaying the same colours that were on the boy's uniform.

The school was in Coventry. _Shit_. Well, Rose was just glad the school wasn't in Cambodia. Now _that_ would've made life difficult.

Rose was still scrolling through the website to find an address, contact numbers and any other handy information, but her mind was already off calculating its own plots. Her clever plans about finding the TARDIS and rescuing the Doctor before the police tracked their photograph down to the hospital were impossible: Coventry was about a hundred miles north-west of where she sat and Rose had no Mickey to drive her at illegal speeds across the country.

There was still a chance… there was still a chance that even _if_ the photograph were on the news tonight, no one would connect the blurry image with the semi-mute young man handcuffed to the hospital bed. Or, at the very least, that they wouldn't be sure until they came to work tomorrow morning. So perhaps the police wouldn't find the Doctor until tomorrow, in which case Rose still had a chance…

She searched the Internet for every possible means of transport and brought up the schedules for buses, trains, planes and automobiles heading towards Birmingham. _Please, please, please…_

All the buses for the day were gone, but there were still trains running through to Coventry. There was one leaving in less than an hour. Rose printed the timetable and the pages on the school, scrunched them into her bag and sprinted out of the library.

-----------------------------------

The phone rang in the Tyler household, which now that Rose was living abroad in the broadest possible sense was really just the Jackie Tyler household. Jackie Tyler herself took a few rings to answer because she was pouring herself a tall glass of wine to soothe her nerves.

"Hello?"

"Mum, I need you to watch the news for me and if they show that photograph again, can you go to the hospital and make sure they don't arrest the Doctor tonight?"

"What? Rose, why are you panting?"

"I'm running to the train station. Can you do that for me, Mum? I just don't want them taking him out of the hospital."

"Why're you running the to train station?"

"To catch a train to Coventry in… shit… twenty-two minutes."

"Rose," Jackie put down her wine glass and sighed, leaning against the kitchen counter and massaging her forehead. "You can't keep running away from your problems. Moving to Coventry is not going to make this disaster go away, it's only going to land you _and _the Doctor in even more trouble, and there's no way for me to clean up your messes."

"Mum, I'm not moving to Coventry. The news is on in an hour. When you get to the hospital, tell the Doctor I've found the TARDIS and I'm going to try and fly it back to the London by tomorrow."

Jackie had been taking a sip of wine: she inhaled at the wrong moment and choked, spraying the receiver. After a moment of coughing and Rose's voice anxiously asking her what was wrong, she wheezed. "Firstly, I can't tell him anything because he doesn't understand a word I say and secondly, _fly the TARDIS to London_? Are you mad, Rose?"

"I reckon I'm going that way. It'll be fine, Mum, I've seen the Doctor handle those controls so many times I couldn't possibly screw it up, yeah? And he knows the word TARDIS now, so just show him a map of England or something and point at Coventry. Gotta go, Mum, I'm just buying my ticket. Love you."

The line went dead. Jackie got a cloth to wipe the phone clean. She put it back in its cradle. She stood in the middle of the kitchen pensively for a full minute. Then she picked up the wine glass and downed it in one gulp.

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	6. A Very Narrow Escape

Please correct me if me sad ignorance of British trains fails me: do your trains even _have_ lunch carriages? Ours do, but most of our trains are for strategic tourist purposes.

--------------------------------------

As soon as she was on the train, Rose decided what she needed most was a stiff drink and after tucking her bag away under a seat, headed straight for the lunch carriage. She ordered some cheap beer that came in a large glass, though a moment later she'd already forgotten what it was called, and sat down to drink it as slowly as possible as the train rattled and swayed beneath her.

She realised as she fiddled with the last couple of coins in her wallet what a sight she must look, drinking all alone with her hair flopping around her face and her clothes looking sadly uncared for, as she had been wearing them for two days straight without even pausing to smooth the wrinkles.

She couldn't remember if she'd ever drunk alone before in her whole life. Once upon a time it had been her and Shareen, out on the town twice a week with twenty pounds for a taxi stuffed into their back pockets that inevitably turned into drinking money. Then the clubs had turned into pubs and instead of Shareen it was Mickey and her, downing a cold one with the cricket on the widescreen telly. Then came the Doctor and suddenly she was watching alien volleyball on promenades overlooking purple oceans, drinking things out of bottles shaped like saucers or scythes, liquors whose names she couldn't pronounce and whose effects on the human body were completely unpredictable (to the Doctor's immense amusement.)

And now it was all over and she was sitting at a bar with her hair in her eyes drinking something cheap in a big glass. _What a clichéd life story, Rose Tyler_, she said to herself.

She looked up at the television sitting further down the bar to see if there was still cricket on this late in the day and saw the opening headlines of the 6 o'clock news. Her miserable musings vanished and she wriggled onto a closer seat, reaching out to turn up the sound just as the Doctor appeared on the screen.

It was not the blurred, barely-recognisable photograph from the newspaper: it was a full colour video, taken from a high angle, and it showed the Doctor entering the shot, wandering towards the camera and looking at it for a couple of seconds and then wandering out of shot again. It was far clearer than the photograph.

"…is this the face of a murderer?" the news presenter was intoning. "London police today released a security video of a man they believe is the same one captured on film by one of the victims. The mysterious illness that has so far claimed six lives, and which the media have unofficially dubbed 'the brain fever', is now thought to be caused by an unidentified poison. The six victims seem to be totally unrelated and any information from the public must be reported to the authorities. The man in tonight's footage remains anonymous; the footage was from a school security camera. The police say it is vital that anyone who thinks they have seen the unknown man, especially if they can identify him, come forward immediately."

The TV switched from the studio to a shot of a grizzled old man standing in front of a school gate. Rose recognised him in a moment – it was the caretaker who had threatened her when she had first found the TARDIS missing. So the footage was from the school where they had parked the ship.

"I never seen him before, so I got suspicious when this fellow starts wandering around school grounds last night after hours and I made sure I got a good look at his face," the caretaker was telling the interviewer. "Then the next morning his photo's in the paper with them deaths, so I go through the security tapes to see if we got a good shot of him and – bingo!"

They showed the footage again. This time Rose leaned down so that she was nearly touching the screen with her nose. As the Doctor looked out at her, his expression serene, she was straining to read the time at the bottom of the shot. They read 18:16. That was just after the Doctor had left to get the chips and about thirty minutes before he had collapsed outside her mother's house.

The TV started displaying photographs of the dead victims. Rose turned the sound down again and realised she was clutching her glass so hard that condensation had formed around her fingers.

Oh, _God_. Oh, Christ in a Gallifreyan dress-robe. She had been so sure that things couldn't get any worse. Rose reached for her phone before she realised it was still in her bag in the other carriage. She left the half-finished beer and sprinted down the aisle until she was back at her seat, fumbling at the zip of the bag and punching her home number in.

One ring, and Jackie answered. "Sweetheart, we've got a big problem-"

Rose cut her off. "I know, I saw the news. Mum, I can't come home, I'm already on the train, but go to the hospital and just – just do anything you can to keep him there."

"Rose…"

"Or maybe you should get him out of there. Can you find Albert and get him to discharge the Doctor? Take him back to your flat?"

"Rose-"

"Just don't let them arrest him, Mum, please."

"Rose… I know you don't want to believe this, but what if he did do what they're saying what he did?"

"Mum, he didn't. The sixth victim was when he was in hospital."

"No, they _found_ the sixth victim when he was in hospital. They said on the news that they think the sixth victim died less than an hour after they took the video of him in the school. And Rose, think about it, he did take an awfully long time getting the chips, almost forty minutes, when the shop is just round the corner…"

Rose dropped down into her seat and bit her lip, furious at Jackie, wanting to scream at her mother about how ridiculous this all was, but most of all furious at herself, because a teeny-weeny voice at the back of her brain was thinking that Jackie was actually making a sense.

"I know you think he's a nice guy, Rose, but I mean, how do you really know? We don't know anything about who he is or what he does when you're not watching him."

"He's not some _child_ who's going to misbehave the moment I turn my back!" Rose burst out. Jackie was silent. "I… I'm the child. He looks after me. Always."

"I know, sweetheart."

Rose took a deep breath. "I have to believe he's innocent, Mum. Because no one else will. Now please, go to the hospital and make sure he's alright. And whatever happens, don't let Dr Mitchell tell them about his two hearts and his weird brain. If they think he's killing people it's bad enough, but if they think he's an alien, they're going to take him away and then I don't know what they're going to do to him. Okay?"

"Okay," Jackie replied softly. "I'll take care of him. Good luck, honey."

"You too. See you tomorrow, I hope."

------------------------------------------

Jackie got half-way down the corridor on the fourth floor when a burley man in a dark blue uniform peeled himself off the wall and stepped into her path. He had the air of solidity about him, like he was in fact a literal piece of wall blocking her way.

"Evening, ma'am," he said, his facial features barely moving. "Might you be Rose Tyler?"

"I might. I might be her mother. What's it to you?" Jackie said confidently, ego boosted a bit by being mistaken for her young daughter. She resisted the urge to check her hair.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to escort you back down to the foyer, Ms Tyler," the man said. "Visiting hours a.0re over."

Jackie gave a strangled cry. "Now you listen here! This is an emergency, I've got a message to deliver to my daughter's… boyfriend, and I'll be damned if a great lout like you is going to stop me!"

The security guard shook his head. "Don't get yourself into a fuss, Ms Tyler. I'm under orders to keep you from visiting that particular patient."

"Orders? Who are you, the Terminator?" Jackie snarled. "You let me through this instant! Whose orders are you under?"

The security guard, evidently practised at dealing with snarling mothers, gently took her arm and steered her back towards the elevator. "Dr Mitchell's orders, ma'am."

"I might have guessed!" Jackie seethed. "Well you just show me to Dr Mitchell and I'll take this up with _him!_"

The guard herded her inexorably into the elevator and pressed the ground floor button. "I'm afraid he's indisposed on other duties, Ms Tyler. He's meeting some guests downstairs and asked that you not disturb them."

Jackie felt her cheeks pinking with the indignation of it, but worst of all, the thought of telling Rose that she had failed to fulfil her promise to her daughter. She pulled her arm out of the guard's grasp but didn't try to get out of the elevator: she was already planning her route to the stairs once they reached the bottom floor, so that she could get back up to the Doctor's ward as soon as the guard took his eyes off her.

But as the elevator doors opened, Jackie found herself face to face with the red-haired Dr Mitchell himself.

Flanking him were two police officers.

Jackie found her throat had seized up as the security guard nudged her out into the foyer. Dr Mitchell glanced sheepishly at her as he led the officers into the elevator. Jackie stared at him, so furious and horrified at the thought of what Rose would say when she found out what was happening that the extensive vocabulary of curses she had learned in her lifetime were not enough.

Dr Mitchell at least had the decency to look ashamed. He nodded to the security guard and mumbled, "Robert, could you make sure Ms Tyler doesn't leave the hospital? Officer Downs may need to speak to her later."

Then the elevator doors slid closed and Jackie felt her throat loosen up again. Robert the security guard had put a heavy hand on her shoulder and was guiding her towards a seat in the foyer. Jackie frantically tried to break free. "Let me go, you bastard. You don't have the first clue as to what's going on! There's been a mistake – oh, bloody hell, this just isn't my scene anymore."

As she sat down, Jackie Tyler suddenly felt far too old for this sort of adventure. She wondered if she had ever been young enough.

------------------------------------------

Dr Mitchell _did_ feel just a little bit bad about this whole business. After all, Peter Harkness was his patient – his fake-named, two-hearted, stroke-addled, hospital-escaping patient, but his patient nonetheless. When you came down to it, he was betraying his patient by turning him in to the police.

But that video on the news – Peter Harkness had _killed_ people, it seemed. Killed them horribly, cruelly, mysteriously. He might try to kill more. Dr Mitchell couldn't let that happen.

"Here we are, on the fourth floor," he smiled to the officers as they exited the elevator. "He's in a private ward. We thought it best, after the escape attempt on his first night – we've had to keep him handcuffed since then."

Officer Downs, an imposing fellow with a faint shadow that might have been a moustache straining for existence, grunted in reply. "We'll take him out of the hospital tonight. You did say he's all in good health, didn't you, Mitchell?"

Dr Mitchell nodded anxiously. "As far as we can tell. The MRI showed no signs of blood clots. Er, though it's been rather hard to tell, you see, we've had trouble…"

"Good evening, fellas. Dr Mitchell," a cocky American voice interrupted the doctor's explanation.

"Dr Zellaby," Mitchell bobbed his head. "I thought you'd gone home."

The young American doctor, who wore his white coat in the way that some women wear fur wraps, all for show without any function, had just come along the corridor in the opposite direction and stopped outside the door of the ward. Dr Mitchell gritted his teeth. He had hoped that the removal of his patient into the police officer's custody could be done as quietly as possible.

"Naw, just doing a last check-up on my patient," Dr Zellaby replied. He sounded friendly, but he seemed to have positioned himself outside the door so that there was no way to get past without physically touching him. "Now why have we got a couple of you guys in here?" he asked, folding his arms over his clipboard and glancing at the two officers.

Dr Mitchell sighed. "You must have heard the news, Mike. We think Peter Harkness might be the same man the police are looking for in connection with those deaths."

"We? Who's 'we'?" Dr Zellaby asked, leaned forward just a bit, a curl of brown hair falling forward to shadow one of his eyes. "Has anyone apart from you identified him?"

"I think I'm qualified to recognise the face of my own patient," Dr Mitchell hissed.

Zellaby leaned away quickly and laughed. "Sorry old man, didn't mean to give you the third-degree. But I don't see why you invited our two neighbourhood watchmen here. You can't go taking Mr Harkness out of the hospital, you know that."

Officer Downs cleared his throat. "Dr Mitchell has assured us that the suspect is in perfect health."

Zellaby cocked his head. "Well now, I think Dr Mitchell might be just a little bit too eager. Mr Harkness is still recovering from a stroke – his mental facilities are down the drain, so to speak, and he's suffering very serious cardiac arrhythmia."

Dr Mitchell spluttered. "Cardiac arrythmia? He's got two hearts!"

The American raised his sculpted eyebrows at his colleague, then looked seriously at the two officers. "Guys, I think even a pair of good cops like yourselves have the medical initiative to know its impossible for someone to have two hearts. Dr Mitchell was taken in by a bad ultrasound and the nonsense of Mr Harkness' girlfriend, but I can assure you, my tests have shown that the patient does _not_ have two hearts."

"Taken in! We ran six different scans! On three machines!" Dr Mitchell fumed.

"Dr Mitchell, I would _ask_ you not to step _outside_ your training. Which of us is the cardiologist, here?"

Dr Mitchell jabbed his finger at Zellaby. "You saw the MRI of his brain. _It was like something not of this earth!_"

Dr Zellaby regarded the waggling finger with a frown and then burst into laughter. He stepped forward to put his arms around the two officers. "As you can see, my friend has rather overreacted to this whole situation. Overwork is my diagnosis – and he's taken an unhealthy dislike of my patient from the start," he whispered to the two burly men.

"All the same…" Officer Downs began.

"Hey, I don't doubt that the resemblance is pretty remarkable, but even if Peter Harkness is the man you're looking for, if you take him out of the hospital now he could be dead by tomorrow morning." He patted the officers on the back. "Wouldn't it be better to wait for him to recover before you start investigating him?"

The officers grumbled their concurrence. The younger one added, "We'd still like to speak to him."

"Impossible, my good man," Dr Zellaby said with a friendly chuckle. "He can't talk. The stroke rewired his brain, didn't Dr Mitchell tell you? Besides, he'll be sleeping right now. I'm sorry you came all the way in here, but hey, how about we go down for a coffee in the foyer and I'll give you all the information I can about our mysterious patient. Come on, whad'ya say?" he shot them both a gleaming white grin.

The officers shrugged and slowly agreed and a moment later the furious Dr Mitchell was left alone in the corridor.

--------------------------------------------------


	7. Six Impossibles Before Breakfast

Am I even more late posting this chapter than usual? Yes. Yes I am. Sorry, sweeties.

Also I think this chapter might be far too wordy, but gosh it was fun to write.

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The Doctor slept, except, being not a quite human, he not quite slept. On the edges of his tri-hemisphered brain was a haze of consciousness that listened, an alertness learned from nine hundred years of escaping death nine hundred times – and nine times of not escaping it.

The Doctor slept: but he was still listening. The squeak of a wheelchair in the corridor, the chatter of a nurse – words incomprehensible but tone unthreatening. The thump and verbal grumble of someone carrying a heavy package to the next ward. The shush of the door opening and stealthy footsteps towards his bed.

The haze of consciousness cleared a little. The Doctor's alertness raised its head and cocked its ears. If it had been a child, it would have been tugging on its mother's skirt and saying, _Mummy, it might be time to escape death again. Should I be ready? Should I wake up?_

He didn't wake, not yet.

"Hello, Doctor," whispered a voice. It came from above the sleeping Doctor's head. The footsteps must have come very close. Unless the footsteps were still across the room and the voice came from a floating head. The Doctor had seen floating heads in his time. He hadn't had to escape death in that instance, so he wasn't too worried now.

The voice was speaking English, though, not floating-head language. Albert the nurse had taught the Doctor what 'hello' meant, and he had learned 'Doctor' from Rose. The Doctor's alertness settled a little. "Hello Doctor," was not nearly as worrying as, for example, "_At last Doctor I have you helpless in my clutches_," or, "_Have you got the axe? Pass it here_," or even, "_I think he's asleep_." All of which would have been the cue for the Doctor to wake as surely as if someone had zapped him with an electric wire.

It took him a moment to realise that only Rose and Jackie knew he was called "Doctor" and, as the owner of the voice was a man, "Hello, Doctor" was not a benign greeting at all.

The Doctor's alertness shrieked a silent Gallifreyan warning in his thoughts: the Doctor woke up in mid-heartbeat. His eyes snapped open, his elbows tensed against the mattress, instinctively moving to push him upright so that he could leap from the bed and head for the exit. But even as his eyes saw that the darkness of the room was complete except for a sliver of streetlight through a the crack in the curtains – in that moment there was a hand over his mouth forcing him back against the pillows. He thrashed, his non-handcuffed arm clawing at the place where the streetlight travelled in a band across a white lab-coat leaning over him. Then he felt the prick of a needle in his neck.

"It's pretty strong stuff, but I think you'll be okay," said the man's voice as the chemical spread into the Time Lord equivalent of the jugular vein and into his hearts and then outwards to limbs and brain.

The Doctor didn't know what the man was saying and as his mouth was currently clamped shut by the hand he couldn't have replied anyway, but he thought, _well, Rassilon be damned, that sounds like Jack. _

Next he thought, _That's pretty strong stuff. Ugh. _His arms seemed to be moving a lot slower, even when he told them to gouge this bastard's eyes out.

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but you know, there's no other way I could've got you out of the hospital. Not if you were awake. Things have gotten very dangerous now, Doctor. I'm sorry for this, but you'll understand."

The Doctor barely noticed he was talking. His eardrums seemed to be humming to themselves, like a badly tuned amateur choir. He told them to concentrate and they ignored him. Eardrums were not supposed to ignore you! Oooh, if his fingers would only wake up he would get in there and teach his aural cavity a lesson.

His brain started to wonder why it was hurting so much. _I haven't felt this groggy since – since – sometime… 's funny but I can't really… remember… something with tha – that girl Tegan – she had nice legs, she did… _

His eyes weren't responding either, now. They wouldn't focus. The man was bending down, his hand loosening on the Doctor's mouth. For a moment, the beam from the streetlight outside shone on his face and the Doctor knew for _sure_ that it was Jack's face looking impassively down at him.

He thought, _Huh. You think you know a guy_.

"Shush, Doctor. Everything's fine. Everything's just – peachy."

---------------------------------------------------------

Rose's awakening was not quite as rude as the Doctor's, but it was certainly worth complaining about. The night before she had gotten off the train and immediately gone to the Post Office, borrowed a phone book and called the principal of the school where (she hoped) the TARDIS was currently perched. The principal of the school was at home enjoying a rum and tonic in front of a roaring fire with his slippered feet sitting on a chair (well, Rose couldn't confirm this for sure, but that was what she _imagined_ he was doing) and he was not happy to be told that he had to come down to school at once to retrieve a huge blue box for a girl he'd never had the misfortune to meet.

"The – what? What are you talking about? Where are you, Miss Taylor?"

"_Tyler._ I'm on the other side of town. Do you have a car? I haven't got money for a taxi."

"I beg your- what is it you _want?_ What are you talking about?"

"The phone box! The phone box that was on your school roof, right?"

"Oh, oh, yes, that thing…"

"Yeah, well, it was stolen. It belongs to a friend of mine in London and he really, terribly, awfully wants it back because… well, sentimental reasons, y'know."

"Sentimental? About a _phone box_? Miss Taylor, I'm sorry, but I'm not driving across town just so you can confirm the theft of some _box!_ I'm in my dressing gown!"

"But I have to bring it home by tomorrow!"

"Wha-what? Back to _London_? Look, I'm sorry, but I can't help you tonight. Come in to the school office tomorrow morning and we will deal with your box _then_."

"But, no wait…"

"_Tomorrow, _Miss Taylor. Now good_night_."

The line had gone dead. Rose had fumed and slammed the phone book shut but not felt any better. Most _particularly_ not felt better because she had been looking forward to spending the night in her cosy, squashy little bed in the TARDIS with its quilt from fourteenth-century Venice and its sheets woven from sheep-tree plantations on the delicate silicon moons that surrounded a gas planet near the Pleides constellation half a million years from now.

She really didn't have the money for a taxi. You got used to not having cash when you travelled the way she did – normally the Doctor just skipped out on the bill whenever they wanted restaurant food, though he had to be careful not to hit the same joint twice in one century – and the knowledge that she was standing on a strange street corner, at night, penniless, bed-less and without a warm jacket made her think of Jackie's favourite threat about what Rose would become if she didn't do well at school.

She found a backpacker's that offered a bed for three quid a night, in a communal dorm with one toilet to ten people and the hint that breakfast _might_ be served between seven and seven thirty, _if_ they were sure the gas leak had been fixed.

Rose lay awake listening to three people harmonising their snores and another providing the percussion by breaking wind. She tried to pretend she was home in bed and the snoring was only the plumbing because Jackie was running the bath in the next room. It didn't work. She tried to pretend the Doctor was lying on the bed beside her, not quite touching but definitely there, his breath doing that soft whistling-thing he did sometimes when he let his mouth hang open while he read. That worked a little better. Rose fell asleep thinking about the Doctor's breathing.

She woke up at six-thirty feeling itchy, lonely, exhausted and desperate for a shower. There was breakfast in the communal kitchen, though it was only a range of cold cereals and some sliced fruit that had gone brown. Evidently the gas leak hadn't been fixed. Rose, trying to remember her last full meal, ate two platefuls and avoided looking anyone in the eye in case they tried to make friendly conversation.

But she could avoid looking at what people were reading. Namely, the local newspaper.

One of the other backpackers had it propped up in front of him. There, on the front page, was a photograph of the caretaker from the school, the one who'd dobbed in the footage of the Doctor. Above his head, in black letter so threatening Rose felt her cold cereal thrash in her stomach, were the words, THE 7TH DEATH!

She leaned across and folded the newspaper down enough to see its owner's face. "Can I borrow the front page of this?" she asked. The young backpacker shrugged and handed it over.

Fingers trembling, Rose read the article. The caretaker had indeed died by the same method of all the others – found collapsed that morning, just before the paper went to print, in the police safe-house where he had been kept, grey matter leaking out his ears. The key witness to the case.

Rose felt sick, then smiled and felt sick at herself from smiling. But she couldn't help it – the Doctor was locked up in hospital. He had an unrefutable alibi. He _wasn't _the murderer, and now they had proof!

Then she saw a much smaller headline below it – SUSPECT SLIPS THROUGH POLICE CLUTCHES?

The article, complete with a thumbnail photo of Dr Mitchell, read, _Late last night police were investigating a possible connection between the man in a photograph taken on the victim's camera and a man who vanished from a London hospital last night. The doctor in charge of the patient, Richard Mitchell, called police because he believed the two men were one and the same: however, the patient was found missing from his room after police were waylaid in the hospital by another doctor, who has also vanished… in local news, parents of a Coventry teen fear for her safety after she was last seen early yesterday morning, after leaving home to visit her brother at St Andrew's college before school. Apparently she never made it as far as the college… _

"You've got to be joking," Rose whispered. Another doctor… had Zellaby, or Jack as Rose was now certain he had to be, broken the Doctor out of the hospital? That would be just like Jack. He wouldn't have known that there be another murder, and the stupid idiot had seen the police so he'd gone and helped the Doctor escape, when everything would have been fine otherwise… it wasn't fair! It wasn't _fair_ for things to just keep going wrong!

And now she didn't have a clue where the Doctor had gone. Surely they wouldn't have been mad enough to go to Jackie's house, as Dr Mitchell would lead the police straight there. So even if she managed to fly the TARDIS back to London, their problems still weren't solved.

Rose dropped the newspaper and dashed off to get directions to the school.

It was reasonably close, a walk of about forty-five minutes. Within that time she standing outside a pair of concrete pillars that marked the gates – a pewter plaque on one read "Saint Andrew's College: Fides et Patris: Est. 1943 for boys with spirit."

She didn't notice that the name of the school was slightly familiar. Rose, hoping they had missed out an 's' from the end of the last word because that was just the sort of thing she felt like right now (even if her mother would have disapproved of drinking at nine in the morning), fortified herself against the thought that since things were looking up that meant they were bound to get worse, then took a breath and stepped through the gates.

---------------------------------------

The principal was a little more helpful than he had been the night before. He was younger than she had expected, dressed in a dove-grey suit with carefully trimmed grey hair but a beardless, creased brown face.

"Do you know who the thieves were, Miss Taylor?" he asked, after coming of his office to shake her hand. "We had to hire a crane to get your phone box off our roof and it wasn't cheap. We'd like to know who to punish."

"Not a clue, but it was no one from your school," Rose said hastily. "They must've come from London."

"Ah." He looked a little disappointed at being denied the chance to punish his students. With an open palm he indicated a door leading out into the schoolyard. "Well, come with me. The phone box is in the Arts Centre storeroom. We were thinking of using it for our school production next year."

"What's the play?" Rose asked politely, not really caring but feeling that since, with her inappropriate clothes, unbrushed hair and smeared eyeliner she looked like every principal's worst idea of youth, she might as well be polite.

"A musical. Our drama coordinator is writing it from scratch – he says that the moment he saw the phone box on the roof he was inspired," the principal gave a patronising little chuckle. "Eccentric man, you know. Says the musical will be about an astronaut who discovers a phone box on the moon and goes inside to find there's a whole city in there."

Rose made a noise of interest as she trotted beside him but she felt as if she had been plunged into a bath of ice. She _knew_ it. She _knew_ things were going to get worse, because they looked as though they couldn't possibly get worse, and now they _had_ got worse. A phone box from another planet with a city inside? No _way_ that could be coincidence.

They came around the corner of the office and Rose felt a flash of déjà vu as the lumpy hall she had seen in the internet blog came into view. Except now there was no phone box sitting on the roof, leaning cheekily down at them.

The principal took her around the back, where three extra rooms were attached to the side of the building, and interrupted a class of pre-teen boys practising some kind of interpretive dance with about as much success as a rhino would have had. As Rose followed her guide inside, a few of the boys glanced around at her. The next second, as if the message had been telepathically emailed to the rest of the class, all the boys stopped their galloping about and stared with slack jaws at the buxom blonde that had just graced their presence. Rose wished for the twentieth time that she'd brought a big, shapeless jacket with her.

The teacher, a thin young man with a too-tight shirt and an early balding spot, listened to the principal's explanation of Rose's arrival. He shook her hand. Rose was too busy trying to read his expression to pay attention to his friendly comments, but she couldn't figure out whether he was hiding something: how much he knew about the TARDIS.

"Well, anyhow," the drama teacher shrugged after she brushed off his attempts at conversation. "I've got to stay with the class but – Sam, Richard, grab a couple of others and go show Miss Taylor where the storeroom is."

The principal excused himself and Rose was shunted onto her new guides, four of the gawking pre-teens in their prudish school uniforms. It didn't occur to Rose at that point that four boys was really far too many when the task was only giving directions. She should have guessed _then_ that things had gone up in the air for sure, though even if she had, she wouldn't have guessed at where they would come down.

The boys directed her towards the main entrance to the Arts Centre, then down a side stair and past a pair of toilet blocks, one labelled BOYS and the other GUESTS – no need for a ladies' room in an all-male school.

Through another door and they were standing in the storeroom. Racks of costumes loomed up to the ceiling, layers upon layers of outfits, many looking faded and frayed. Props – everything from bits of furniture to umbrellas and scarves – were stacked on every available surface, leaving only a small canyon to walk through. Hanging on everything were hats of every kind.

"The Doctor would like this," Rose said to herself, picking her way between a Victorian nightgown and a plywood Corinthian pillar.

"What's that?" One of the boys asked.

"It's there, round the corner at the end," another said, pointing past Rose.

Rose parted two threadbare tuxedos and there it was. Bright, bold, beautifully blue and magnificent as the first time Rose had stepped out of her and into a new age. Shadows were draped across her roof as if she was veiled in sleep, but Rose reached out a tentative human hand to touch her and knew that the ship was alive, awake and waiting.

"Well," said one of the boys behind her. "Go on. Go inside."

Rose had half-forgotten they were there. She turned quickly, embarrassed to be caught stroking a police box like some ruddy Time Lord. The four boys were standing in the thin gangway, eight eyes observing her. Rose suddenly appreciated how long and thin this corridor was, how far away the door, and how perfectly the four boys blocked her only exit.

"What d'ya mean, go inside?" she said haughtily. "I'm not going to stand inside a box like a duffer. I'd look like a right idiot."

"Don't play dumb."

"We _know_."

"We've _seen_."

Rose half expected their voices to echo and grow deep, or perhaps the boys would even grow leathery wings – that was probably what would have happened if the Doctor had been here – but instead they still sounded like a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

"Know what?" she snapped.

"It's bigger," the tallest and thinnest of the boys – Richard was what the drama teacher had called him – hissed. "Bigger on the inside."

There was no bluffing her way out of that. She crossed her arms and leaned against the door of the ship. "How do you know, then?"

A boy with very frayed sleeves – Sam, Rose thought his name was – gave a snort of derision. "We knew as soon as they brought it down into the store room it weren't some ordinary box. You can feel it humming – like a computer when its switched on."

"Oh, yeah?" Rose raised her eyebrows with equal derision. "So how'd you get in? _I've_ got the key."

"There's a spare key in a cubby-hole above the 'P' in 'Police Box'," a third boy, with scruffy blonde hair, said eagerly.

Rose looked up at the TARDIS. "No there isn't!"

"There is, I've got it here," said Richard, pulling a small, shining key out of his pocket – of identical shape to Rose's.

She gaped at it. "Bloody hell! Why didn't he ever tell me about that?"

"Who?"

Rose shook her head at them. "The man who owns the box – never mind."

"It's a teleporting machine, innit?" the fourth boy, wearing glasses on his round face, frowned at her.

"Don't be silly." Rose said, injecting as much of a patronising tone into her voice as she could, the way her mother talked when she wanted to brush away a notion she didn't like.

"It appeared on the Arts Centre roof," Sam said sourly. "I bet _you_ can make it work. Aren't you going to go inside?"

Rose looked down her nose at him. "I don't really feel like it, yeah? If you've got a key, why don't you go on in. I'll catch you up."

The boys glanced at each other. Richard put the key back into his pocket. "We promised Mr Sampson – our drama teacher – we wouldn't go in again. We showed him the inside and then something… you see… there's something in there. Mr Sampson said it might be dangerous."

Rose held his gaze, hoping he was lying, but he stared right back at her until she looked over her shoulder at the blue door a few inches from her nose. She hadn't expected that. But it made sense. Something had stolen the TARDIS. Something that was still sitting inside it, perhaps trying to decipher its workings – or perhaps hoping its true pilot would come wandering back to it.

A trap: a trap for the Doctor, set by something that didn't realise how stealing the ship had affected its prey's linguistics. Maybe… or maybe the boys had been scared by nothing more than shadows and the churning time rotor.

The Doctor wouldn't have hesitated. The Doctor would have gone striding straight into the trap and turned it back on its creator.

Rose thought, _I'm not the Doctor_. But still.

"Alright," she said. "I'll go in. You all stay back," she gulped as she turned to face the door and take the key from the chain around her neck. "I'll deal with whatever is inside, okay?"

"We'll hold the door open," Richard said, appearing at her side.

"Just… get ready to run," said Rose as she slipped the key into the lock. In the padded storeroom the sound seemed muffled. She twisted and felt the ship _shush_ as the key was recognised: next moment the doors were opening like the arms of a loving mother, widening to admit Rose into her confidence.

Rose stepped inside. The TARDIS looked exactly as she had left it. Duct tape held a railing together not far away: the tessellated dome's green panels brightened a little as she stepped forward. The console sat, alive but inanimate, the time rotor silent and still as it always was when landed.

"Hello?" Rose called. Silence. "I'm Rose Tyler," she continued. Then she thought of her first Dalek and felt like a stupid ape. "This is my ship," she cried, in her strongest, most Doctor-ish voice. "And if there's someone in here who shouldn't be, come out now before I find you. I just want to talk."

"Hello?" Rose's voice echoed back to her.

How odd. That was a _really_ delayed echo. Rose fell silent, listening.

"I didn't know it was your ship," said Rose Tyler's voice. "I'm just scared to go outside alone."

Barely able to believe her own eyes (and she _had_ seen some things that _most_ people would not have believed even if they had gone up and _licked_ them) and frowned at the impossibility of _this_, of _all_ things. Rose Tyler, standing on the ramp that led up from the door, stared at herself as Rose Tyler stepped out from behind the console.

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	8. A Multitude of Helping Hands

Could it be that I'm updating _early_ this week? No way. _And_ an extra long chapter. I must be getting soft in my old age, spoiling you all like this.

Also, for the pumpkin I'm beta-ing at the moment (you know who you are) I'm just running through your chapter ATM and will have it back to you in the next couple of days, promise.

You can probably tell I wrote this chapter at work where the phone constantly distracts the sensible part of my mind from keeping track of what my fingers are writing. It has rugby players and hookers and dark alleys, oh my!

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It was Rose – perhaps a couple of years younger, but Rose, nonetheless. It had to be. Look at her, it _had_ to be. She had Rose's teeth, she had Rose's _mascara_. She had one hand drifting away from her body, touching the console with the tips of her fingers, _exactly_ the way Rose would reach out and brush the Doctor's coat when she was not quite sure of herself.

For a brief second, Rose honestly wondered whether she was not who she thought she was, whether perhaps she had been mistaken and she was the impostor and this girl the real Rose Tyler. Then she shook herself. She was being silly. This was a time machine. This was Rose from the past. She didn't know _how_, unless the Doctor had been getting up to some business she really didn't want to know about.

In her peripheral vision she saw one of the boys – the tall one, Richard – come up beside her. She couldn't take her eyes away from the other Rose.

"Blimey," whispered the boy. "You gotta twin?"

Rose didn't answer him. She took a couple of steps forward, feeling like a zoo keeper trying not to make any sudden moves in front of the lions. "How did you get here?" she asked.

The other Rose drew back, closer to the console, chewing her nails without looking away from her second self.

"You must've gotten onto this ship somehow," Rose said, sliding closer. "Did you walk on by accident? Did it appear and you just came on board out of curiosity? It's alright, I'm not angry," she added, trying to make her tone as soothing as possible. She'd left the ramp and was only a few metres away from the other Rose, now.

The second Rose sniffed. "I don't know where I am. Out there is all different."

"I know," Rose cooed, holding her open palms in front of her. "I know, it happened to me once too, but it's all safe. Is there anyone else on the ship? Are you alone?"

For a second, the other Rose's face changed: she was suddenly so young and her features were in agony. Rose couldn't keep herself from taking a quick intake of breath. She was distracted for a moment, or she would never allowed what happened next. The other Rose gave a sob, tears welled up and spilled through the mascara-filter of eyelashes to make black streaks on her cheeks, and she threw herself into Rose's arms and bawled against her shoulder.

Rose didn't have time to shout a warning or jump back. She found that her arms were tightened around the young Rose but her body was frozen with terror. Then she raised her head. Nothing had happened. No giant, shrieking, scythe-tailed dragons. The TARDIS hadn't vanished. The world wasn't ending.

She grabbed the other Rose by the shoulders and pushed her to arms' length. "Who are you?" she snapped.

The other Rose was still crying, her lower lip shaking. "You're m-me."

"No, you're _not_ me!" Rose growled, shaking the girl. "If you were me, there would be Reapers, and… and Paradoxes and Rifts and other sinister nouns! I _know_ because I've _been_ with myself and bad things happened! Don't try and trick me, I've seen far too much to be fooled."

The other Rose put her hands over her face and cried harder.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Rose groaned. She relaxed her grip on the girl's shoulders and pulled her into a hug again, massaging circles into her back. She could feel the bumps of the other Rose's spine under her hands. "I suppose if you wanted to kill me you could have done it by now."

The only answer was more sobbing.

"Come on, don't be such a twit," Rose said. "What's wrong with you?"

The muffled reply, vocalised between wet sniffs, surprised Rose. "My mum went away to find Gran. She said wait here until she came back but she hasn't. I d-don't like this big place."

Rose frowned to herself. "What are you? Are you a shape-shifter or something? Are you very young?"

"I-I'm old enough to look like whomever I want to," the girl replied, drawing back a little to wipe her eyes.

"You _are_ a shape-shifter, then?" Rose said excitedly. She knew she shouldn't be, but she'd found an alien at last – which, had things been progressing as an adventure with the Doctor normally did, meant that the climax of the adventure was not far away. "What do you usually look like?"

"Like myself," the girl mumbled. She leaned against Rose's chest, blowing her nose on the back of her hand. Rose found she _did_ feel oddly protective of her, even if it was just because the girl had tricked her by changing into the Rose-clone.

Her brain began to process this new development at once. Of _course_ – the photograph in the newspaper, the video on the TV: just as Rose had insisted, it wasn't the Doctor at all, but just someone like this alien, who had pretended to look like him! That meant he hadn't committed those murders at all! That meant…

Another alien had. Possibly this one's mother.

Oh. Rose could see this was going to be one of those adventures with an ethical dilemma at the end. They used to put the old Doctor into a mood for days. He'd stalk around the TARDIS breaking things just so he had an excuse to fix them and not talk to Rose, while she got grumpier and grumpier and finally told him she wanted to go home to her mother. The prospect of Jackie on the horizon usually made the old Doctor backpedal out of his surly temper at turbo speed, but it was still a threat Rose didn't like using if she could help it.

Her new Doctor was easier to handle when big ethical dilemmas came around. Easier, but… scarier. He didn't go into moods. He just killed the problem. Sometimes literally. Rose knew he had a conscience (she'd seen him use it, hadn't she? Wasn't there that one time where he'd done that thing, er, where he'd done good things? He did good things all the time) but she did wonder if her job had become less to keep him company and more to keep him leashed.

"Right," she said, turning to Richard. The boy leapt to attention. "Right," she repeated. "I'm going to try and fly this hunk of junk."

"_Fly_ it?"

"To London," said Rose firmly. Behind Richard, the boy with glasses punched his fist in the air in triumph.

"That _means_," Rose added. "You all have to get off the ship."

There were four outraged cries.

"_No_," Rose raised her hand for silence, her other arm still wrapped around the shoulders of her second self. "If you die, it's my fault. Get out."

The boys' faces were so dejected Rose felt like she'd just thrown a sack of puppies in a river. She sighed. "My friend is in trouble, kiddies, and I've seen the type of trouble my friend gets into. I can't have you running around in the middle of it. But look, maybe after all this is sorted out we'll come back to say thanks."

Better not tell the Doctor about that one until she had to.

After a few further demands for the ship's return, the adolescents were finally cleared from the deck of the TARDIS. Rose lead the girl to the battered couch and told her to hold onto the railing, then turned to face the console.

Right. Cracking her knuckles and dredging up the memories of every time she had watched the Doctor manically mishandle the ship's levers and buttons, Rose stepped up to the spot where he usually began. She reached out and flicked a switch.

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Outside in the storeroom, the boys scrambled into a cluster a few metres from the police box, perching on fragile Victorian chairs and crates comically labelled 'TNT'. As they watched the silent door, Richard found that he was holding his breath. Then, beside him, Sam grabbed his elbow and gasped.

There was a buzzing in the air. The four boys leaned forward. The light on top of the police box suddenly flared into life, bright as a stage light. The buzzing grew louder and morphed into a jagged clunking which climaxed and ceased.

There was silence.

It happened twice more before the door of the police box opened a crack and Rose Tyler's head appeared, looking attractively pink in the cheeks. "I, er, it won't work." She mumbled.

"Is it broken? Did it crash land?" Sanjay asked. Sanjay, who Richard thought had probably chosen the path to geekhood the moment he was told he would have to go through school wearing glasses, had been the first one to suggest that the police box could teleport. Sanjay read a lot of science fiction and none of the other boys had really listened to him until he had snuck them down to the storeroom and showed them that the box was humming.

"Erm, no. I sort of don't seem to be able to make it fly, yeah?" the blonde girl (/woman/chick/corruptor of pre-teen boy's thoughts, said Richard's brain) explained through gritted teeth. "I've never actually done it before. Just watched my friend get it working. He hits it with hammers and talks to it a lot. I don't think it likes me."

Sanjay looked crushed that they were not going to witness his theory of teleportation.

Rose sighed. "Can you think of any other way to get it to London by the end of the day?"

"You could drive very fast," said a man's voice. Everyone jumped guiltily, since the storeroom was technically out-of-bounds. Behind them, Mr Sampson, their drama teacher, was picking his way through a rack of dancing outfits, his eyes roaming over the face of the blue box. "It is a space ship," he said. Richard could neither tell whom his words were addressed to nor whether they were even a question.

"Yes and no," Rose Tyler answered nervously. "It's not going anywhere in a hurry, at any rate."

"Like I said, you could drive very fast," Mr Sampson said mildly. "I think if we get it strapped down properly, we could fit your space ship onto one of the trailers behind a school van."

Rose beamed at him. "You serious?"

"Where space ships are considered, it's hard not to be," he replied.

After a moment her face fell. "But how're we supposed to get this thing into a van? It's not exactly regulation postage. It must weigh more than we can carry."

Once again, Mr Sampson answered as if pointing out a simple stage trick in class. "It's morning tea. First fifteen are meeting in the hall above us."

Rose made a lopsided face. "Huh?"

"This school is known for its dedication to rugby. And I'm a very close friend of their coach. If you'll come with me for extra incentive, we can have fifteen burly young men here in five minutes to help us get your space ship out into the sunshine."

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Travelling with the Doctor had broadened Rose's mind to previously undreamt-of proportions, but there were also a few things she had forgotten. One of them was how easily school students are distracted by anything out of the ordinary, like large blue telephone boxes being carried across car parks. Another was how much she liked burly rugby players. Travelling with the scrawny, speedy little Doctor, she had forgotten how _distracted_ she could get by broad-shouldered young men.

The rugby players, (who Rose had to assume were quite good at judging balance and how to make things fall over, since that was basically what rugby seemed to consist of) were resolute that the police box would be too unstable if carried upright, and therefore had to be placed lengthways on top of the trailer, strapped down by ropes from the tech room. Rose, who had left her doppelganger inside the ship on the basis that two buxom blondes would probably cause the distraction factor of one multiplied by six hundred thousand or so, was hesitant. She couldn't disagree with the rugby players, but she had no idea what flipping the TARDIS sideways would do to the orientation of its insides. She just had to hope that if the console room did end up with a wall for a floor, the shape-shifting alien would have the sense to hang on to something for the entirety of the journey.

By that time, however, a large crowd of students who were supposed to be in class had gathered. Rose, distracted by the broad-shouldered young men, hadn't realised how conspicuous their activities were until the principal turned up, having seen the crowd from the office block and wanting very much to know what Mr Sampson was doing giving away one of the school vans.

Very quiet argument ensued. Rose marvelled at the way the two teachers could bicker in such a manner that no one standing more a few feet away from them could tell their discussion was heated. It meant that none of the students could see their authority figures in disarray, which was a very clever trick that she imagined dictators probably used.

She wasn't sure how Mr Sampson convinced the principal to let her borrow the van, but apparently he did. This was the first good news Rose had heard for some time. The second good news was that unfortunately Mr Sampson had to stay at school to teach his classes. This seemed bad for a second, but turned out to be a lot better because, Mr Sampson explained, the reason the rugby team had been meeting at morning tea was because they were supposed to play a game in London tonight and were quite happy for Rose's TARDIS-towing van to tag along behind their bus – in fact, several of the rugby players would come in the van with her. Which was lucky because Rose couldn't drive a van, and at least three of them could.

Which meant that everything was sorted. Which meant that she was bringing the TARDIS back to London, along with an alien who might be able to help solve the whole mystery. Which meant she had solved one problem without the Doctor's help and was well on her way towards solving the second.

Which, as the van chugged out of the school, towbar groaning, Richard and Sam waving goodbye from the driveway, and a blue-eyed young man offered her a thermos filled with contraband Schnapps, made Rose feel very, very pleased indeed.

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Within a dark alley past midnight in a seedy streak of London, the Doctor stopped to catch his breath and get his thoughts in order.

He was alone. His feet were starting to hurt because he had no shoes and the seedier pavements of London seemed to be jealous of people who wore jewellery and had decided broken glass was the best way to make a good impression. The Doctor felt slight offended by his own personification of the pavements; but then again, it was probably the beginning of madness creeping in because he had not talked intelligibly to anyone for two days.

He curled up against a concrete wall that said NO PARKING and tried to wrap his hospital gown tighter around his legs for warmth. The hospital gown was not designed for warmth. It protested at this use by clinging damply and coldly to his calves. Now he was personifying hospital gowns – this was getting ridiculous and also slightly disturbing because if the hospital gown was personified, then it could probably see his private parts.

Think. Stop blabbering to yourself and _think_, he told himself. Where are you? You don't know. Probably in London, but really, who knows anymore? Definitely on Earth and going by the architectural style, the United Kingdom. If you're judging by that particularly mild acid-rain saturated smell coming off this concrete wall, you are probably in twentieth century London.

How long were you asleep? Unknown. But it's the early hours of the morning, so possibly the same night. Very likely the same night, or you'd be at least a little bit hungry by now.

How did you get here? The big question. Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? What is my purpose – _stop it!_ Think! Stop distracting yourself!

The Doctor closed his eyes and began to create a timeline of the events that had lead to this moment. He started with his earliest memory of Gallifrey, fast-forwarded several centuries, paused briefly at the moment he knew that the Time War was going to end, fast-forwarded some more, flicked over to the page in his life that detailed the entirety of his adventures with Rose, zoomed in on the last line, and began to read carefully.

Approximately thirty-five hours ago (assuming this _was_ the same night he had been drugged in his hospital room) he and Rose had come home to visit Jackie. Rose had wanted to buy some Earth-supplies that she couldn't get in the Great Universal Cloister Markets of Om, which had everything anyone had ever wanted to buy except, apparently, sanitary pads longer than five inches and with little wings on the sides.

They had arrived on Earth. Everything had been normal as far as could be judged by looking at it, which wasn't very far. They had left the TARDIS on a school netball court near Powell Estate and gone back to Jackie's house. Various conversations had ensued. The Doctor fast-forwarded to the point where Rose had decided she wanted chips for dinner and he had left the house.

That was the first moment that he felt something was wrong. Just a little tingle as he walked out. You didn't survive nine hundred years of flying about in a box without learning to sense when someone was watching you. No, they hadn't quite been watching, but – aware of him. Someone on Earth had been aware of him, on a planet that most of the time was barely aware that there were cars other than their own driving around on the roads.

Instead of heading straight to the chip shop, he had detoured to the school to check on his ship. He had peered at the security camera on his way in, wondering if there was anyone on the other end and deciding that there wasn't. The TARDIS had been right where he'd left it. He hadn't needed to go inside to know that she was perfectly happy humming away to herself and nothing untoward had touched her or tried to get inside her. So he'd gone to get the chips.

It was as he trotted down the home stretch and Jackie's flat came into sight that he realised that "aware of him" had been scaled up to "watching him". He was careful not to glance around. No need to give away the element of surprise. He'd wandered towards the apartment block, chips tucked under his arm, waiting for a fanged monster or luminous ether-creature to step out from behind a wheelie-bin and confront him. He would have been ready to handle something like that.

Sitting in the alleyway with his shoulder blades going numb from cold, the Doctor doggedly tried to figure out what happened next. There had been an explosion of pain, a weight on, or around, or _in_ his head, a bang that he thought was his eardrums imploding, then a lot of misplaced time. Rose's voice and face came in there somewhere, fading in and out like a torch with flat batteries.

But, in his memory, what she was saying didn't make sense. His memory-self only took a second more to realise that he couldn't hear the TARDIS in his head. He remembered the crushing horror as fresh as ever: his ship, his precious home, his darling eternal companion, was not humming away in the back of his brain as she always did. He'd staggered to his feet, trying desperately to communicate the problem to the milling humans around him, but they were hopeless. There had been flashing lights, noise, then the pain in his head had overcome him again and he'd woken up in the hospital.

He sorted through the next few waking hours without much faith that he'd find any clues. At least Rose had understood when he'd visually explained to her his predicament. He assumed she'd taken the logical course of action and pretended he was human to the Earth doctors, as they had spent the next day treating him like a mental patient. Then, after the sedatives, there were the handcuffs. Absolute frustration. Endless hours of waiting, trying to find a way to unscrew the railing of the bed in order to free himself. He heard shouting in the corridor at one point – Jackie's voice? But no one had come in. He'd started to worry – no sign of Rose, no sign of her mother, no sign of anything. He'd started to feel the beginnings of panic as he realised he was separated from the only people on the entire planet who knew who he was and what he needed, and they seemed to have abandoned him. To avoid the stress of waiting, he'd dozed.

And been awoken to the impossibility of Jack Harkness' face, a needle in his neck and a drug that knocked him out like a wrecking ball.

When he'd next woken, he'd found himself lying with a thin sheet covering his entire body. He'd sat up, realised first that his handcuffs were gone and second that he was in a moving ambulance. Well, that was easy to fix. Trying to stay as low to the floor as possible to avoid being seen by the driver in the rear-view mirror, he had slipped across the shuddering floor and very carefully checked that the back door was unlocked. As soon as he felt the ambulance slow at a set of traffic lights he climbed out, quietly shut the door behind him and sprinted towards the nearest dark alley. He'd been running through darkened streets ever since then.

He sighed and struggled to his feet again. It would actually be kind of nice to be back in the hospital right now, lying in a soft bed in a warm room… beset by drug-wielding men who looked like Jack Harkness. Alright, maybe being cold and alone in midnight London with sore feet wasn't the worst place he could be. He'd endured much worse hardships then this. There was that time in the scorching desert on Khanicha when he'd sat on a rocky outcrop for eight hours waiting for companion number one to rescue him, trying to shelter companion number two from the sun for the entire time (she had delicate skin) and unable to move more a metre in any direction because if they set foot on the sand the worms would have eaten them before they could snap their fingers. That had been a rough eight hours. The UV burns had been so bad he'd peeled for weeks afterwards. His hair had gotten a nice blonde sun-tint for a while, though.

Right. This wasn't Khanicha. This was Earth. There were no sand-worms. But there was a companion who would rescue him if only she could find him. So, first things first, give Rose a call.

He stumbled out of the alley and down the street for a couple of blocks. Under an ugly amber streetlamp he found a row of open telephone booths, which soothed him a little even though they barely resembled the TARDIS at all. He checked them for spare change, but there was none. By Rassilon's nose, damn them all.

"You all well there, darlin'?" Called a voice. The Doctor looked up. Two ladies were standing under a nearby streetlight, watching him. He felt an instant kinship to them as they were also wearing clothes quite inappropriate to the cold weather. He smiled at them and gestured at the phone. There was a human hand signal for money, he could remember Rose making it to Mickey as a joke, but he couldn't remember what it was. He sighed and mimicked putting coins in the slot.

"I think he wants to make a phone call," one of the ladies said to the other. The other replied, "But he's out of money. Poor thing." The first said. "Looks like he's escaped from the loony bin," to which the second replied. "Can't be that loony, if he knows how to use a phone." The first pointed out, "Except he's trying to use it without money, so he might well be loony." The second rolled her eyes and suggested, "Why don't we give him some money and see if he knows what to do with it, then?" To which the first said, "_You_ can, if you're so curious."

The Doctor understood none of this, but he beamed happily when one of the ladies strutted over to him, rummaging around in a tiny sequined purse at her side, and held out a few coins. He bowed in thanks and took them, inserted one into the slot and dialled the number of Rose's cell phone. He'd had a devil of a time memorising it back when he'd first met her, but now he was glad he'd taken the trouble.

The other end of the line picked up at once. "Hi, this is Rose Tyler, I can't answer right now because I'm too flamin' busy, or I'm asleep, but leave a message and I might get back. Cheers." Though this was all unintelligible to the Doctor, the tone of an answering machine is universally recognised in every language. He said a word that would have made a Gallifreyan time-sailor turn pink. "Rose. Hello," he said desperately. "Erm." He rummaged through the tiny vocabulary that he had learned over the past thirty-five hours and found nothing of value for this moment.

Clutching the phone to his ear he glanced around and saw a street sign above his head. He couldn't read it. He tried describing to Rose's answering machine what each letter looked like, "Double triangle, circle with tail, hump, crescent, hump with neck, squiggly thing… oh, _no_!" He realised he was still speaking Gallifreyan. On the other end of the line, the answering machine ran out of time and screeched at him as it hung up the phone. The Doctor slammed the handset back into its cradle.

"You alright, hon? Are you French?" asked the nice woman who had given him the money. The Doctor felt his hearts leap – at least _someone_ was trying to help him. He pointed at the street sign, then at the phone, then at her, and mimed talking with his hand. He put another coin in, dialled Rose's number again, and held the phone out to the woman.

She frowned at him, then stepped forward and took the phone as if afraid it might be electric. She listened to the tail-end of Rose's answering message and then glanced at the Doctor. He pointed at the street sign again.

"Read the sign?" The woman said aloud. She shrugged. "Okay. Um. Hello, it's… three-twenty in the morning and I'm just standing on Manchester Street, north end. I've got a fellow here who doesn't seem able to read English or something, I'm assuming he's a friend of yours. Anyway, I think if you get this message you better come and pick him up soon, he looks like he shouldn't be out of doors without supervision. Um. Bye." She put the phone down in a hurry.

The Doctor grinned at her and held his arms out to embrace her. Though he had no idea what the woman had said, he was sure there was enough information in there for Rose to at least have some clue as to his whereabouts. The woman eyed him warily and then allowed him to give her a quick hug.

"Shelly!" the other woman suddenly shrieked. "Get away from him!"

The woman jerked away from the Doctor. "What? What's wrong, Barbie?" she yelled.

"I just recognised him – he's that murderer from the paper! He's that Jack-the-Ripper fellow!"

"Oh my God," the woman dashed back to where her friend stood. The Doctor's face fell at the prospect that he had mortally affronted his new friend in some unknown way. He held out his hands in supplication.

The women shrieked at him. "Get out of here! You bastard! We're calling the police!"

The Doctor knew that something had gone very wrong (_again_) and he couldn't talk himself out of it. Well, he wasn't eloquent in words alone. He let his hands fall to his sides and shuffled closer. The women yelled at him. He hunched his shoulders and looked at them with his biggest, shiniest, saddest eyes. He made his lower lip stick out just a little so that it looked like he was trying to smile but didn't quite have the heart to. This was the face that he used when he wanted Rose to do agree to something she thought was possibly a bad idea. It _always _worked with Rose.

One of the women was fumbling in her bag. She pulled out a crinkled piece of newspaper and held it up at eye level. "It _is_ him," she cried, holding the paper out to her friend, who had whipped out a clunky mobile phone.

The Doctor was oblivious to how the newspaper had incriminated him, but it was obviously connected to their reaction in some way, and he was also curious. He pointed at the paper and did his best to look mystified.

"Call the cops, Shelly, call them!" Barbie groaned, but Shelly hadn't yet pressed any of the buttons on the cell phone. She took the paper from her friend and held it at arms' length so that the Doctor could see it.

"It's you!" she spat at him. "You get me? You!" She jabbed at him with the cell phone to illustrate her point.

The Doctor stretched out a hand and she allowed him to pluck the paper out of her fingers. He studied it, frowning, then shook his head (which he was almost certain was the human gesture for "no"). He pointed at the paper and himself and shook his head again, making a slash with his hand to emphasise that the person in the newspaper had nothing to do with him. He handed the paper back. Shelly snatched it away from him.

"You don't _believe _him, do you?" Barbie said anxiously, standing behind her friend for protection. "Look at him! He looks like he's escaped from the nutter's ward. He's some whacko illegal alien or something."

The Doctor watched Shelly study the face in the newspaper and then his own face, which was pleading to her with his friendliest expression. Her features softened a little.

"It's a pretty shitty photo," she mused aloud. "It _might_ be a totally different guy. Didn't you see the news tonight? They had a video of the murderer-fellow and he was wearing totally different clothes. And besides, if this Jack-the-Ripper wannabe was in a mental hospital, like this guy obviously has escaped from, they would've recognised him and arrested him long before now. They wouldn't let him go wandering about the streets."

"Shelly, that's the most ridiculous excuse I've ever heard! How can it be a coincidence that a harmless nutter escapes from a hospital right when the police are looking for a murderer who looks just like him?" Her friend snapped.

Shelly bit her lip and looked from the Doctor to the newspaper. The Doctor did his 'convincing-Rose-that-a-bad-idea-is-actually-a-good-idea' face again, with all his might. Finally Shelly said, very uncertainly. "I think this guy is harmless. Maybe a bit lost, but still harmless."

"What? Are you joking?" Barbie asked, eyes boggling.

"Come on, Barbs, look at him. He looks like he wouldn't hurt a fly. I think if we were any kind of decent, we'd take him home ourselves until someone comes to find him. I'm done for tonight anyway, I wanna get off the streets before the temperature drops any more. Let's get him home and see if we can figure out what language he's speaking." Shelly's voice had become very soft and maternal. She gave the Doctor a small smile.

The Doctor recognised this and silently cheered his triumph. He wasn't sure what had gotten the ladies so worked up, but it sounded like he'd talked himself out of it. And without even saying a word. The Doctor gave himself a mental pat on the back for being just too good at everything.

That photo, though… that was troubling. The Doctor knew it wasn't a photo of him, unless it was of him at some future point in this regeneration (it wouldn't be the first time that sort of thing had happened). But however the photo had come into existence, it was obviously linked in with this whole mess of trouble. It had briefly turned the two ladies against him, and he wondered if it had anything to do with Rose and Jackie's absence.

Not for the first time, but for the first serious time, the Doctor wondered if Rose and Jackie might not be alright.

The woman who had given him the coins, the one the Doctor thought was possibly called Shelly, took his arm and directed him down the street, her friend walking a few feet behind and muttering mutinously to herself. He came willingly, wondering if Rose would mind him going home with these two nice ladies-of-the-night and deciding he wouldn't tell her about it if he could help it.

-------------------------------------------------------


	9. Glorious Phonelines

I'm late again. Eeek. And this chapter's possibly a bit dull. Eeek. How is everybody? In other news, I finally saw _Runaway Bride_ and was mightily impressed with Donna. Pity she's not a long-term companion, really. She would have been a lot of loud fun.

-----------------------------------------------

The Doctor pulled back his shoulders and eyed his reflection in Barbie's full-length mirror. Quite a fine figure of Time Lord remnants was looking back at him. Alright, it wasn't pinstripes and Chuck Taylor's, but he'd certainly worn uglier outfits – in fact, he rather felt that uglier the better. It showed distinction and eccentricity, which were two of his most powerful weapons.

Barbie had given him the clothes not long before. "These are my son's. You can keep them. He went north with some friends a few months ago and hasn't called," she said as she handed him the lovingly ironed bundle. The Doctor didn't understand what she'd said, but he understood that the clothes were attached to a long, unhappy story. He thanked Barbie in English – which surprised both the ladies – and then switched to Gallifreyan to promise her that he'd come back and return the clothes when he could.

Prior to this scene, his new friend Shelly had argued fiercely and at length before Barbie agreed to let him into her house for the night. The Doctor hadn't known at that point why she'd needed to argue, but once they were inside Shelly did her best to explain the reason his photograph was in the paper. She showed him the full article the picture had been snipped from, with six other smiling thumbnail photographs – and then mimed to indicate that everyone in those photos was dead.

It didn't take much to figure out how he was involved from there. A murderer with his face… that was an odd development. He took the article with the intention of inspecting the photo for clues about the subject's real identity and was reaching for his coat pocket before he realized his glasses were still in the hospital. Damn. Well, whoever they were, he was gonna give them a good shake and a slap when he found them. Possibly literally, if he still couldn't communicate his anger verbally by then.

He smoothed down the front of his new shirt. The outfit was of archaic cut, probably third-hand, and beyond its tidiness it had little to recommend it. The stiff grey jacket was too wide in the shoulders and the colour clashed hideously with the maroon trousers. Barbie had offered him a different pair, but the Doctor rather liked the maroon trousers – they brought up nostalgia for the far-gone days when he'd picked his clothes for their distinctiveness in a crowd. The shoes were too big even when he pulled the laces as tight as they would go.

Shelly had also given him one of her hats – a cap similar to one Rose had worn some time back, saying it was all the rage, but which looked like the sort that urchins would clutch in their hands while begging for coins in Victorian London. The Doctor didn't want to look like an urchin, but he knew why Shelly thought he should wear it: it was the closest he could get to disguising himself on the street. The next person who recognized him from the newspaper probably wouldn't turn out to be as friendly as these two ladies.

He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to work out the best way to put on the hat without ruining his hairstyle. But even Time Lords' knowledge is not infinite. Sighing, he decided he would leave the hat off as long as possible. The last thing he wanted was to come out of this adventure with a reputation not only for murder, but for bad hair.

Shelly and Barbie were asleep at the other end of the house. They'd given the Doctor the couch for the night, but he'd faked sleeping until they were gone and then got up to try on the clothes. Humans slept for a ridiculous amount everyday and he just didn't see the point of it all. You couldn't fight Cybermen if you had to crash on a bed after every fourteen hours.

He wandered through to the tiny kitchen, sniffed out the teabags and then found the kettle was broken. He considered chewing a teabag as an experiment and decided that was just getting desperate. Jamming his hands into the unfamiliar-sized pockets, he slipped out the front door and craned his neck back to see the colours of tonight's clouds. They had a sort of prickly orange-ish tinge. He closed his eyes and reached out to the places in his mind that had once been occupied by the Time Lords and, more recently, the TARDIS. Both were empty, and seemed to be sucking little full bits out of his thoughts.

He wished he could telepathically seek for Rose the way he had looked for any survivors of his race countless times, but humans just didn't have the same brains. Rose could be dead. By Time and Space, Rose could be _dead_. And he was swanning off with a couple of scantily-clad English babes and wondering where he could find a good cup of tea.

He shook his head and wondered why he kept doing this to himself. Maybe it really was time to go solo. Things were so different since the War (which in his mind was not even a word any more but an entire language locked up beneath his Gallifreyan so that everything he thought or spoke had the words of the War running like swirling undercurrents through his mind.) Companions had come and gone before the War, and he missed nearly all of them, he _loved_ all of them (and there was no need for love to be in the past tense, because for a Time Lord the past can never really exist, not _really_, but for one exception which was Gallifrey). But he hadn't ever felt responsible for them. They _chose_ to come with him.

But now, now the war was gone and the authority of his people with it, Rose's choice seemed reckless and ignorant, born from the heat of the moment and buoyed along by adrenalin and the endless stream of adventure. She didn't understand what had happened to all those past companions. She was only a baby. Maybe it really was time to stop giving people the temptation of that choice.

And after all, it wasn't as if he _needed_ anyone to look after him. Not at _all_.

There was a faint drizzle of sunlight chasing the London streetlights and washing off the prickly-orange colour from the clouds. The Doctor saw that the morning paper had been thrown at Barbie's door and fallen off her concrete front steps into a puddle. He picked it up, shaking off the excess drops of oily water, and absent-mindedly unrolled it.

The headline of the front page was bold even by headline standards, three undecipherable black words. The Doctor wandered back into the house, flattening out the paper and wondering why the old man whose photograph was frowning up at him looked familiar. Below him were several pictures the Doctor had seen before: the victims whose deaths Shelly had mimed to him. The event that connected all seven photographs was clear.

His eyes wandered down the meaningless pattern of black letters and saw a much smaller photograph: Dr Mitchell, the red-haired man from the hospital who had ordered the sedatives and handcuffs. The Doctor would bet ten years of his life that Dr Mitchell hadn't been put in there for his contribution to medicine. Another death, and his surgeon brought in to the mix? Things had just gotten worse for him.

He rested his chin on his hands and studied the paper. So someone thought his disappearance from the hospital was worth printing. And the picture of the old man had that slightly furry, home-snapped quality about it that indicated the subject was no longer alive enough to have their photograph taken professionally. Another murder. Right after he left the hospital, it seemed.

Someone really, really wanted to pin these deaths on him. The same people who had made sure he couldn't escape earth in his blue alien machine.

And _Jack_… he had seen _Jack_… how was that possible? How did it fit in?

Barbie and Shelly might have believed him last time, but when they saw these headlines they probably wouldn't be able to keep up that faith. Pity. They were nice girls. But it wasn't fair to involve them in this any longer. He smoothed out the paper again and jammed Shelly's hat onto his head, hair be damned.

As opened the door he noticed a mug full of writing implements sitting by the phone, including a black marker pen. He grinned and slipped the pen into his pocket. It wasn't a sonic screwdriver but it might come in handy.

Wishing he knew just enough of the English alphabet to write thank you on a piece of notepaper, the Doctor took a last look at the flat and then shut the door behind him.

---------------------------------------------------

"Oh, I'm an _idiot_," snapped Rose, resisting the urge to slap herself on the forehead.

The seventeen year old Rugby player, who had been telling her in greatly-relished detailed about the wild party he'd been at the night before, ceased listing alcoholic drinks and frowned at her beneath a pair of thick brown eyebrows.

"Because of Vodka cruisers?" he asked, obviously unaware that Rose had not been listening to a word of his story.

"What? Oh, no, the Vodka cruisers sounded brilliant," Rose said, smiling at him and surreptitiously reaching for her phone. "I was just trying to work out how I could get in contact with… well, anyway, it just occurred to me."

The Rugby player looked astounded that someone could give so little useful information in a twenty-one-word sentence.

"Can you excuse me a sec? Just got to make a call," Rose turned towards the window and switched on her phone. She had kept it under her pillow at the backpackers', partly so it would be nearby if her mother called and partly because it was the only possession she couldn't stand to be stolen. She must have rolled on it during the night, because she wouldn't have switched it off deliberately.

She dialled the TARDIS number and listened to it ring. What an idiot – they'd been driving for two hours, and all that time, she'd worried about how her doppelganger was coping in the re-oriented time machine, still strapped to the trailer behind them. It had taken her this long to realise that there was no reason she couldn't call the phone inside the TARDIS.

Though she often got calls from the Doctor on her mobile, returning the favour was more rare. Usually it happened when she was on Earth visiting her mother and the Doctor went off to pick up a pizza from that nice German restaurant in the twenty-third century and Rose changed her mind about getting the ham and pineapple with zaphod sauce right when he was halfway across the galaxy. Or when she went grocery shopping and left the list on the console.

The phone rung eleven times before the other end picked up. There was silence.

"Hello?" Rose called.

"Oh. Hello." Her own voice replied, sounding rather distant.

"It's me, Rose."

"Who?"

"I found you on the ship," Rose said, enunciating her words as clearly as possible. The nearest rugby player glanced curiously at her.

"Ah! I'm sorry. I wasn't sure what was happening. Should I come out?"

"No! No, stay in there. Why are you so quiet?"

"Sorry, I've never used a communicator device like this. Is the wire supposed to go across your eyes?"

"Sweetie, you've got it upside down. The grills go the other way around." Rose realised that she had just said 'sweetie' to a face-thieving alien whose nearest relative may have framed the Doctor for seven murders. She wondered, not for the first time, if insanity was some kind of Time Lord common cold.

"Oh! That's better."

"Good. I was just wondering if everything in there is tipped on its side."

"Er, I don't think so. Everything swayed a bit a couple of hours ago but then things hummed a bit and it went back to normal."

"Good. Okay, that's all. Just stay in there for a few more hours and then I'll come in and get you." Rose promised.

"Wait! I've got no one to talk to in here."

Rose was jostled by one of the Rugby players, who muttered an apology when she took the phone away from her ear and shot him a venomous glare. As she returned to the call, she noticed a small icon at the top of her screen. Voice message.

"I've got to go. I'll call you back later," she said quickly to the alien in the TARDIS.

She pressed a few buttons and put the phone back to her ear. A mechanical tone hummed to her. "You have – TWO – new messages. To listen to your messages, press one-"

Rose squeezed the button.

A few minutes later, she finished the phone call and slipped her mobile back into her bag. She found herself breaking in a grin and her fists thumped her knees. "_Yes!_ He's alive! He's _safe!_ _YES!_"

The rugby players around her did their best not to stare. Rose didn't care. She beamed at them, leant back against the seat and propped her arm on the windowsill to cushion her head. "Wake me up when we get to London," she told one of the students as she let her eyes fall closed.

---------------------------------------------------

It was early afternoon in busy London and a man in maroon pants and a Burberry hat was wandering around with a very serene look on his face.

All around him, people orbited and flowed like space dust. They were smiling as they talked to each other. They were hurrying back and forth with all the appearance of a life filled with purpose. People were eating pastries in cafes and giving way to pedestrians at intersections. London seemed like quite a nice place when you couldn't understand what anybody was saying. No, that was unfair, London was always a nice place. Well, fairly nice. Well, not the worst place.

He'd been walking for hours now, trying to find his way back to Powell Estate. He'd gotten lost at least four times. His legs were starting to get very grumpy with him. But he was almost positive he recognised this street. And it was _wonderful_, walking around and enjoying the world without having a clue what the people around him were saying. Nobody had recognised him from the newspaper picture. Who could? He hadn't been smiling in the picture.

It had been centuries since he had been oblivious to the languages around him. Come to think of it, it had only happened twice. There had been that time that Tegan had let a load of energy-seeking borer-mites into the TARDIS console and fried the translation computer. The result was that everyone started speaking their mother-tongue except the Doctor, who was inexplicably stuck thinking only in fourteenth-century French. That had taken a week to fix because he couldn't read the TARDIS manual.

The only time before that, that he could remember anyway, was back before he'd ever flown a TARDIS. He'd been in college on Gallifrey (_blimey_ he'd been young back then, these memories were _ancient_) and there had been a research trip with some other students and a senior lecturer, on a Utopian planet named Narayan. They'd left him behind (which was only _partly_ his fault) and he'd wandered around the vegetative city for three days, having no idea what anyone was saying, before someone from the college came back to pick him up. The Time Lords supervising him had threatened him with expulsion, but it wasn't the first time and he'd charmed them into forgiveness eventually. That's one of the many things that would never happen again.

Without even realising it, his impatient feet had taken him within a few blocks of Powell Estate. He quickened his pace and at last, there stood the forbidding block of flats where his little human girl had spent her short lifetime. His grin grew wider. In his mind could already see Jackie opening the door and screeching in that decibel only Jackie could reach, throwing her arms round him (he found himself actually looking _forward_ to a hug from Jackie) and then together they'd muddle through charades and pictionary until they figured out where Rose was and that was about as far as the Doctor's imagination stretched before he remembered that he was still stuck on Earth without his ship.

Then he saw the police car parked at the bottom of the block. He ducked down behind a skip and watched two officers come out of Jackie's flat, stretch police tape across the door and jog down the stairs. No sign of Jackie. Surely she wouldn't let herself be taped into her own flat.

The Doctor felt his hope deflate with a near-audible wheezing noise.

No Jackie. No Rose. Mickey was in another universe. He didn't have the faintest clue where Sarah-Jane might be. No one else knew his face except as the murderer in the papers. No one else at all, no one else except… well, actually, except…

-----------------------------------------------

"Prime Minister?"

Harriet Jones looked up from her paperwork, very glad for the distraction. Her secretary, a nice young Maori fellow named Sampson whom she was determined would not get killed on her watch, was peering around the door looking very apologetic. This was most unusual for him, as she had picked Sampson specifically because he was charismatic and impulsive, which (she hoped) would help get him Not Killed.

"There's a man on the phone," Sampson said, sounding at a total loss of further information. His confusion was so plain that Harriet Jones briefly wondered if there was _literally_ a man actually _sitting_ on his phone, before she realised how silly this was.

"Who is it? Put him through," she said in an austere tone. She had been practising this particular tone of austerity to counteract such situations of confusion.

"I'm not sure if I should, Prime Minister," Sampson said, biting his lip. "He's called eight times in the last hour and a half but he won't say who he is. Caller ID says he's ringing from a phone booth. He doesn't seem to be able to speak much English. I can't even figure out how he got a hold of your extension, but he must be some ning-nong."

Harriet Jones frowned. "Won't say who he is?"

"No, Ma'am. Just keeps repeating certain words."

"Like what?"

"Meaningless stuff. He says 'hello' and 'please' and 'Doctor' and then he goes into some language I can't even guess at. It's bizarre… Prime Minister, are you alright?" Sampson stepped into the room.

Harriet Jones swept aside her paperwork and drew herself to her feet, like a ship bursting over the crest of a wave. "Put him through. Put him through _at once!_"

"Right away, Ma'am," her assistant said, hurrying backwards out of her office.

Harriet Jones snatched up the phone as soon as it rang. "Who the hell is this? Is that you, Doctor?"

A burst of riotous laughter was her initial answer. "Harriet Jones!" said a voice she had heard for only a short time on a very memorable day. "Pah-rime minis-tah!"

"It is you! By golly, you've got some cheek, calling me! How did you get this number? Do you know your face is all over the television? Oh, I bet you do," Harriet Jones stalked backwards and forwards as far as the phone chord tethered her. "Well? What's this bloody disaster about?"

"Harriet Jones," said the voice, a little more patiently. Then she heard something very odd. The voice on the other end of the phone said a lot of things that sounded like gobbledy-gook.

"Doctor, I can't understand a word you're saying. Have you got a bad connection?" she asked.

The voice sighed. "Rose house," it said.

"Rose house? What? You've gone mad!" Harriet Jones snapped at him. "You've gone mad and started killing people and you better bloody well stop it or I swear, I will have my people on you before you even realise you're caught."

"No! No! Rose Tyler house," the Doctor's voice cut in. "Please."

Harriet Jones began to understand what he wanted of her. "If you think I'm going to be associated with you, you can think again. You've nearly ruined me once, Doctor. You won't believe the things I had to do after that little whisper-six-words stunt you pulled at Christmas. Sacrifices I had to make. I'm not going to come and meet you."

"Please," he said. "Please. Harriet Jones, Rose Tyler house, Doctor. Please."

Harriet Jones felt a muscle in her cheek twitch. Every instinct told her to slam the phone back into its cradle, but the voice on the other end was far removed from the grinning, arrogant weasel of a man who had scolded her while he stood in a bathrobe on a deserted London street. Now he was _pleading_.

She sighed. "I don't know what's wrong with you, but… you're not going to go away if I hang up this phone, are you?" she sat down and leaned her forehead against the heel of her hand. "When do you want to meet?"

The Doctor let out another stream of nonsense.

"Alright! Alright, stop that, I'm coming. And by golly, you had better be waiting for me when I get there," she closed her eyes for a moment in the hope that he would go away and stop bothering her by the time she opened them. It didn't work. "Alright. Yes, Doctor. Rose Tyler house. Yes. I'm coming now."

And with that, Harriet Jones let the phone drop. She paused to make absolutely sure that she couldn't just go back to her paperwork and let her alien menace sort himself out and decided that no, there was every chance that she alone had the power to intervene in this. Where the Doctor was concerned, she could not risk leaving this problem alone. The planet would probably be blown up if he didn't have his way.

She put on her jacket, got to her feet and stalked out of her office. "Sampson," she said as she strode past. "I need a car right now. Private, please."

"How private, Ma'am?"

She stopped and turned towards him. "No one is to know I have left the office, and if they ask, I have popped out for afternoon tea," she said.

"Of course. When should I tell them you'll be back?" Sampson replied genially.

Harriet Jones took a breath and hoped to goodness that she had chosen an assistant who could follow orders with good sense. "If I do not return here or call you directly in over two hours, you must break the seal on the emergency numbers, call Torchwood and tell them I have gone to Powell Estate to meet the Doctor. Those words exactly."

Sampson looked as if she had just blown an air-horn in his face while wearing a clown outfit and singing heavy metal music. "Yes, Ma'am," he said. "Er. Can I ask..,.?"

"Confidential, Sampson. As confidential as it can possibly get."

"Totally understood, Prime Minister."

---------------------------------------


	10. The Murderer's Case

I went to Wellington and WROTE. For, like, _four days_. What. And I saw art by Colin Mc Cahon whose name is a bitch to pronounce, and it was good, but my Great-Aunt found spelling mistakes in one of his paintings, which kind of mutes the Colin Mc Cahon effect. Clearly I get my nit-picking from her. No, really, it's a genetic disorder, I'm certain.

There is not enough Harriet Jones in this chapter. I must remedy this in further chapters. Maybe I could write an ode?

--------------------------------------------

Rose Tyler awoke to the sound of Mozart. Very tinny, squeaky, blotchy Mozart. She was suddenly aware of the jolts and vibrations of the van, the filthy joke that one rugby player was saying to another rugby player, and Mozart. It was not so far removed from waking up on an alien planet.

"Your phone's ringing," said one of the rugby players.

Rose woke up properly. The rugby player sitting in the seat in front of her was wearing a tight khaki shirt which clearly displayed the kind pectoral muscles that people take photographs of and put on calendars. Rose did not have time for pectoral muscles because, in one bold-tendoned hand, he was holding out her phone, which was still breathlessly attempting to finish Mozart's 40th on an abbreviated loop.

Rose snatched it, registered that the number was unknown, then answered. "Hello? Doctor?"

"Hello," said a very kindly English lady. "Is that Rose?"

"Yeah. Yes," she quickly corrected herself, because the voice sounded like one of those schoolteachers who refuse to answer to 'yeah'. "It's Rose. Who's speaking?"

"Harriet Jones, dear. We met at Christmas. And in Downing street a few months before that."

Rose felt her throat give an excited gulp. She covered the mouthpiece of the phone for a moment and glanced up at several of the rugby players who had seen her chest-bouncing reaction to the last phone call and had turned around in their seats to see if they would get a similar reaction this time.

"I've got Harriet Jones on the phone!" Rose squeaked.

One of the rugby players gave her a disdainful look. "What Harriet Jones?"

"What Harriet Jones do you think, nimrod?" Rose replied. "My old lady neighbour Harriet Jones? Do you think I'm going to get excited about _that_? Oh, my God, the Prime Minister called my phone," she put the mobile back to her ear. "Are you there? Sorry about that."

"Quite. Now listen, dear, I've got the Doctor here with me…"

"Oh my God, thank you," Rose leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. "You are a wonder, Harriet Jones. I'm sorry I missed the election; I would've voted twice if I could. How did you find him?"

"I found him a great inconvenience," Harriet Jones said sternly. "First he practically jumped in front of my vehicle as I was approaching Powell Estate. Then he climbed into the car without so much as a by-your-leave. Then he was nearly shot by my driver, who automatically assumed I was being attacked by some foreign assassin. And now he won't tell me why on earth he needs my help in the first place."

Rose had to put her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. When she was certain she could keep her voice at an appropriate tone for speaking to the leader of Britain, she did so. "I'm afraid that's the sorta behaviour you just have to get used to with him. He doesn't mean to be avoiding explanations, though. He can't talk."

"I gathered that much, dear. His gestures seem to be indicating that his brain's been scrambled, or possibly that he wants omelette for lunch. It's hard to tell."

"The first one. A bit, anyway," explained Rose. "I think some kind of alien threat has tried to put him out of action. He's totally normal, he's just forgotten how to speak English mostly."

"Totally normal is rather relative, don't you think?"

"Yeah. _Oh_, yeah. God, I'm glad you found him, I saw the newspaper this morning and I was so bloody worried, I had no idea where he's got to."

"Then don't stop being worried. What one earth is going on, Rose? What _not_ on Earth? His picture's in the paper and one of you had better start explaining…"

"He's not the murderer," Rose interrupted quickly. "He's been with me during half the deaths. I promise you, Harriet Jones, he's innocent. There's something else in London killing those people. A shapeshifter, I think."

"A shapeshifter," said Harriet Jones doubtfully. "Well. I can't tell you I completely believe you, _or_ trust you, but… I suppose I fully accept that nothing is impossible anymore. Where are you?"

"I'm just driving back from Coventry with the TARDIS. I'll be in London before six."

"Back from _Coventry_?"

"It's a long story. I'll tell you everything you when I get there."

"Very well. Now what do you want me to do with the alien sitting here in my car?"

"Oh. Um. Don't let the police arrest him."

"Yes."

"And don't let him out of your sight."

"Yes."

"And ask him if he's seen my mother, she's not answering her phone."

"Alright. But what do I _do_ with him? Where can I meet you when you get here? If anyone recognises him there's going to be hell to pay, but I can't very well take him back to Downing Street and hide him in a cupboard or something. Well, I suppose I could…"

"You could try. Just… just keep him under wraps a little while longer. Thank you so much, Harriet Jones, I mean _really_, thank you. I know you've probably got better things to do."

"Like running the country."

"Like that. Thanks. Put him on, can you?"

There was the fumbling sound of a phone being transferred from ear to ear, and then the Doctor's voice burst out of the speaker. "Rose! Hello!"

"Hello, Doctor," Rose found her legs trembling with relief. "I suppose there's not much I can say to you that you'll understand."

The Doctor answered in a flurry of alien nonsense.

"Yeah. I bet you're saying something really rude, you bastard," she laughed. "And I bet you think it's funny, too. Anyway, I've got the TARDIS…"

"Buh?" said the Doctor.

"The TARDIS. Rose – has – TARDIS. Coming – to – London."

"_Buh?_"

"Never mind. Just let Harriet Jones take care of you until I get there. I'm going now, Doctor, goodbye. Did Albert teach you that word? Goodbye."

The Doctor replied with more jabber. Rose sighed and hung up.

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They reached London sometimes around six – just a little bit late because the rugby bus voted (very undemocratically, Rose felt, but she was riding on their charity and didn't want to complain) to drive through a McDonald's for tea. Rose took the chance to make sure the TARDIS was still securely fastened and ring her doppelganger again.

The team finally finished their journey at a suburban rugby clubhouse. There, under Rose's meticulous supervision (she was getting rather good at this ordering-people-about thing, she felt with a swell of pride) unloaded the ship and plonked it in the back of the clubhouse where she felt it would be reasonably safe. Once Harriet Jones had brought the Doctor here, he would restore his connection to the ship and they could move it wherever they liked.

"We're all staying in the motel just around the corner," the team captain told Rose. "But we're playing a game tonight at eight, if you want to watch."

"If I've got a chance, maybe," she hinted.

"Have you got somewhere to stay?" he glanced over his shoulder at his team-mates and grinned, "You're welcome to bunk down with us tonight."

"Yeah, come on, Rose!" several of the boys hollered.

"It's tempting, but my mother is still living here," she said with a wink.

The boys roared their disappointment as, laughing, she headed outside to get her bag from the van. The carkpark was a zebra-coat of shadows and beams from the floodlights, but its emptiness made her hurry across the gravel. That was when she walked into a veritable wall of muscle.

Automatically she leapt back and tensed to run, just as the figure stepped out of the van's shadow and into the light.

She felt her mind distance itself from her body. "Jack," she whispered.

"Hi there, sweetcakes," he said with a characteristic half-smile.

Rose couldn't help flashing back to every ancient romance film she'd ever seen, full of swooning damsels and men with chiselled features. If she hadn't been so overcome by the sight of this dead man, she'd have slapped herself for acting like one of those damsels. But it was so _impossible_ for him to be here.

She said exactly what every shocked black-and-white film heroine had said before her: "It _is_ you."

"In the flesh," he said, sauntering closer. He was still wearing the white lab coat from the hospital.

Rose massaged her temples. "I brought you back, didn't I? With all the golden light and godly powers, is that what happened?"

"Damn lucky you did, too. But we've got more pressing issues on hand. I'm afraid I lost the Doctor. Right before the seventh murder," he turned his head a little, exposing his best angle while also managing to look mildly apologetic. His every gesture and movement was just as she had remembered him: he hadn't changed a bit, except for that hint of grey at his temples,

She had to lean against the van to get her thoughts straight. "But how did you get here? You were thousands of years away!"

"I hitched a ride on a passing timeship eventually," shrugged Jack with that self-satisfied smile that was so familiar to her. "I'll explain everything later. You have the TARDIS here, right?"

"Yeah, I found it in Coventry. Mad, huh?" Rose chuckled, tongue in her teeth.

She expected Jack to ask how the ship had gotten to Coventry, but all he said was, "Good. She'll be safe here. You have to come to the hospital with me: I know who's doing all this to the Doctor and I know how to stop it. Don't worry about transport," he added, "I stole an ambulance."

------------------------------------------------

They didn't talk much on the way to the hospital. Jack seemed… laconic. Rose was so stunned to have him beside her, living and well and driving an ambulance down Oxford street at ninety miles an hour, that she didn't mind. But it was _odd_.

"How long has it been – _watch out for that bike –_ since we last saw you?" She asked after the silence began to get annoying.

"About fifteen years. I've been around," he shrugged. "Didn't you notice the grey?"

"I did actually," she said huskily. "I kind of like it."

He grinned and turned his head to cup her cheek with one palm. "I knew there was a good reason to come back here."

"You should watch the road," she smiled.

"Shit. Yeah," he swerved around a limousine backing out of an alley and took a corner so fast Rose was thrown against the window.

There was silence for another ten minutes until the glowing toothpaste-coloured windows of the hospital came into view. Jack parked the ambulance in the darkest and deepest recesses of the carpark and jumped out to open the door for Rose. She told herself not to simper at him. He offered his hand for Rose to step down. She simpered.

Jack seemed to know the key-code to get into a medic's door at the back of the hospital. He lead her through brightly-lit but mostly deserted corridors, occasionally pulling her into storage cupboards if someone in uniform was coming around the corner in the opposite direction. Rose found the _Mission Impossible_ soundtrack playing in her head, and hummed Mozart to try and get it out.

"Here," Jack said, as they reached a corridor of small offices. Rose followed him inside one room halfway along, noticing that _Dr Richard Mitchell_ was embossed on a plaque on the door

"Are you kidding? Why would you put it in this git's office? He had the Doctor handcuffed!" she hissed.

"I hid it in here for safekeeping. The police took him in for questioning after I vanished," Jack said. Which didn't really answer her question to the extent she would have liked, but she didn't want to nag. The lights were off inside the office and Rose's eyes were slow to adjust. She balked her shin on what she hoped was nothing more sinister than a wastepaper bin and began to feel the romanticism of creeping around with a time agent-cum-con artist beginning to wear thin.

"Jack, what is going on?" she whispered, feeling for his arm in the darkness. She could see the white outline of his coat but the rest of him was invisible, a smudge in the shadows. A moment later he stepped into the square of light coming through the doorway. He was holding a brown leather briefcase and beckoning to her.

They hunched over Dr Mitchell's desk. Jack was flicking the locks on the case when Rose put her hand on his wrist.

"Are you sure this thing is safe? Maybe we should call the Doctor first," she said.

"Of course it is – and you can't call the Doctor anyway. Besides the fact that he wouldn't understand a word you said, you left your cellphone in your bag in the van," Jack answered.

"Oh," said Rose. "So I did." She hadn't noticed. How had he known?

"It's perfectly safe. I've used it before," he lifted up the lid of the briefcase. Rose squinted, but there were too many shadows.

The case looked as if it was filled with a pool of darkness. A pool of darkness that was sloshing against the leather sides. A pool of darkness that was gathering into a form that was slowly reaching up _out of the briefcase…_

"Jack…" Rose straightened up a little. "You mind filling me in on what this thing is?" She made to step away from the desk.

Jack's arm shot out and his fingers locked around her neck from the side, thumb curled around her throat. She froze.

"It's fine," he said. His voice was toneless.

Rose tried to ease out of his grasp and felt it tighten. She did not whimper. "Let me go," she said quietly.

"It's alright," Jack said, and his voice was so friendly: that cocky, accented, confident voice that had convinced her to dance with him the first night they met. It was so familiar. So _exactly_ how she remembered it, "There's nothing to worry about, Rose. Just take a look."

She tilted her head upwards, but couldn't keep herself from looking down at the briefcase with only her eyes. Something had solidified out of the blackness: a limbless, twisted, black _something_ that was beginning to raise itself toward her face.

Rose tried to jerk away.

Jack grabbed her arm above the elbow and forced her towards the briefcase. She shrieked and struggled.

A wastepaper bin came soaring out of nowhere and slammed into the side of his head.

The hands clutching Rose released her. Off-balance, she fell towards the desk and the writhing black monster leapt up to greet her. Mostly out of the instinct to restore upright posture her arms flew out, grabbed the lid of the briefcase and slammed it down as hard as she could. A split-second later Rose landed splayed across it with all her weight. The edge of the desk caught her in the diaphragm and performed an amateur Heimlich manoeuvre, winding her completely.

All this happened in about a second.

Gasping for breath and unable to make sense of anything her eyes were seeing in the poor light, Rose's other senses leapt to the forefront. Firstly, she could hear somebody being battered unconscious with a wastepaper bin and secondly, something under her stomach was wriggling.

She pushed herself upright and saw that the black monster had been trapped half-in and half-out of the briefcase. It was flapping and struggling like an electrocuted rabbit and a ringing noise like the blue-screen of a telly filled Rose's ears – or was the ringing only in her head? Liquid that looked equally black had spurted across the desk where the briefcase had nearly cut the creature in half. There was the strong smell of antiseptic and concentrated sheep droppings, the latter of which Rose did not recognise because she had never been in the habitation area of many sheep.

For a moment, still unable to catch her breath, she stared in disgust. Then she grabbed the keyboard sitting behind the desk computer, ripped it off its power chord and brought it down on the black creature's approximate head-appendage. Several times. Hard. After a while, she noticed it wasn't moving any more. She dropped the keyboard on the ground.

There was a click and fluorescent light brought Rose's eyeballs back to work with a vengeance. Squinting and wheezing, she saw Dr Mitchell standing by the door with one hand on the light switch. In the other he clutched the rim of a metal wastepaper bin.

Jack lay front-down on the floor, eyes closed, head turned to the side to display some bloody and purpling wounds in the locality of his temple, though Dr Mitchell obviously hadn't been too fussed exactly which part of Jack's face he hit. With each breath that he took, his skin rippled, briefly displaying the features of a man twice his age with none of his good looks.

Rose felt her breathlessness diminish to make way for a sickness that had nothing to do with disgust and everything to do with shame.

"Oh, God," she choked. "I believed him," she looked up at Dr Mitchell, who was staring at his handiwork in shock, his hand over his mouth. "It didn't even cross my mind… he knew everything about Jack… he knew things only Jack would know… but it's not Jack… it's not even human…"

Dr Mitchell put his back against the wall and slid to the floor, still holding the wastepaper bin.

"_It's perfectly safe. I've used it before,"_ the impostor had told her less than a minute ago. Rose felt her legs trembling and put her hand on the desk to keep herself upright. _Seven times before_ echoed in her head.

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	11. A Serious Turn

I am so late writing this, omg I am going to hell, yes. I moved to University and took up residence with two hundred other students in (essentially) a commune/hive of young people. My room is 1/4 its previous size and I have no Internet. Ha, I win.

NB: I'm sure I've said it before, but I treat all gaps in canon as a caver would treat large dark holes in a cliffside. Don't think that when I say "Tom Baker's Doctor was a baritone singer LULZ" I know what I'm talking about. If you see anything that directly contradicts established canon, call me out on it. Other than that… just don't take me for serious.

Final A/N: This chapter is long because argh it is suckage. It was awful to write. I was not drunk when I wrote it, btw, even though the average blood alcohol level limit of this city at any one time is well above the legal driving limit.

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There were several minutes where no one tried to move much. Dr Mitchell ran his fingers through his thinning ginger hair and let his chin sink down almost to his chest. Rose laboured to restore her winded breathing to normal. The body on the floor twitched a bit.

After her heart had stopped racing, Rose's train of thought started moving again. She walked over to Dr Mitchell and held out her hand. He took it and she helped him to his feet.

"Thanks," he panted, putting the wastepaper bin back on the floor. There was a bit of blood on the bottom edge. Rose decided not to look at it.

They both stared at the body. Rose had to force herself not to call it 'Jack'.

"Why's, er," Dr Mitchell licked his lips. "Why's his face keep doing that?"

Rose and rather hoped he wouldn't ask her that. Trying to convince another human being that an alien is lying on their office floor was one of those things she always felt she might be able to do better if she'd stayed at school longer. She didn't think she could cope with any more madness. More than that, she didn't want to work at _talking_. Her body was still churning with adrenalin and she wanted to _act_, to start _running_ and _fighting_ and just generally not forming coherent speech.

"It's a sort of mask," she shrugged. "Nanobytes, yeah?" she added casually, as if they were as ordinary as garden fertiliser.

"Oh. Yeah," Dr Mitchell replied, as if he had just been thinking about fertilising his roses. Another long pause. "I think I'm feeling far too calm, having just killed someone," he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

"'S alright. He's still breathing," Rose assured the doctor. "Also it's shock that's making you calm. It'll catch up to you in about an hour."

"You an expert on these sort of things?" Dr Mitchell asked.

"Pretty much. Life or death situations crop up regularly in my schedule."

She was standing by the desk, looking down at the twisted, mangled black shape still pinned half out of the briefcase. It still smelled strongly of chemicals and rotting, inorganic matter. She wasn't afraid of it now. It was just another dead alien, if indeed it was a living thing at all, and not some kind of weapon, or, or, robot or… and she had _killed_ it.

"And w-what about that thing?" Dr Mitchell gulped, breaking her out of her thoughts. He was pointing a trembling finger at the desk.

"More nanobytes," Rose shrugged. She picked up the wastepaper bin and, using the briefcase, swept the black flesh and ooze into it. She managed to get the rest of the briefcase open and the rest of the mass tumbled into the bin. The Doctor would want to see this, once he got his connection to the TARDIS restored. He'd do something about it. She just had to get everything to the Doctor.

Dumping the wastepaper bin by the door, she slowly knelt beside the body, ready to leap away if it moved, and shook its shoulder. The body didn't stir. She glanced around the room and pointed at the broken power chord where she'd ripped the keyboard out. "Pass me that, will'ya?"

Dr Mitchell jumped at the chance to be useful. He went and picked up the paperweight on the desk until Rose clarified what she wanted. She twisted the body's arms behind its back and when he finally got the chord out of the computer she tied up the body's wrists with her best Girl Scout knots. Mickey had taught her the knots. Not from being in the Girl Scouts, of course. She wasn't really sure where he learned them, but she was ninety percent sure it wasn't the Girl Scouts.

"I never liked that keyboard. I keep asking tech for a new one," Dr Mitchell said from somewhere behind her.

Rose laughed obediently.

"It's true. I wasn't just trying to lighten the mood. Not exactly the best time for it, really," the doctor continued, a shudder entering his voice. "Funny. You kind of expect that you're going to kill someone sooner or later, being a doctor. I'd always hoped that when it happened it'd be someone who deserved it, so I wouldn't feel guilty. Well, someone who didn't _not_ deserve it, at least. Now its happened just as I wanted, but its not at all like I thought. Funny, huh?"

"I think you're babbling," Rose told him.

"Sorry."

"I don't mind. Kind of reminds me of a friend of mine," she smiled at him over her shoulder.

He nervously returned the smile. "Er. I'm just gonna call the police…"

"No!" Rose leapt to her feet. Dr Mitchell's hand stopped an inch from the phone. "Don't do that. They can't handle this kind of situation. Trust me," she said sternly. His hand retreated.

"You're secret agents or something, are you?" he asked.

Rose nodded. "Yes. Yes, I am. Now give me a hand."

She was leaning down to haul the body up under the arms. Dr Mitchell stared. Rose jerked her head at the body's feet.

"Oh. Oh, right," he said.

Together, taking turns carrying the wastepaper bin, they managed to manoeuvre the body out the door. This was as far ahead as Rose had thought. All that was on her mind was getting the false Jack back to the TARDIS, calling Harriet Jones and letting the Doctor take care of everything else. Without really considering it, she'd assumed they'd have to take the body back in the stolen ambulance.

"Are you bonkers?" Dr Mitchell cried when she explained her plan. "They're blaring that number plate all over the radio. You'll never get across town without being pulled over. How'd you even get to the hospital in that thing?"

"He was driving pretty fast," Rose shrugged. She thought quickly. "Do _you_ have a car?"

"Yes."

Pause. "Well," Rose said with a pointed glare, "can I use it?"

It took Dr Mitchell a moment to realise what she meant. "For transporting corpses?" he squeaked. "You _must_ be bonkers!"

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Dr Mitchell insisted that he drive their makeshift hearse, which was fine by Rose. She leaned her head against the window and watched the streetlights until they gave her a headache. It was still early after sunset, but Dr Mitchell seemed (sensibly enough) to be choosing a route that took them through the emptiest streets in the area. Between the exhaustion, isolation and smoky evening lighting, she felt like she was travelling through an art-house film.

They didn't talk much. Rose had told Dr Mitchell the general area they were heading towards and he headed towards quite obediently. Finally he cleared his throat and spoke.

"So, your Peter Harkness – is he in league with the man currently residing in the boot of my car?"

"No! He's got nothing to do with these murders. He's being framed," Rose said indignantly.

"But he escaped the hospital with Dr Zellaby's help…"

"He was _kidnapped_," Rose snapped. "I've been in contact with him since then. He got away and is going to meet us."

There was another long pause. "Is he a secret agent too?" Dr Mitchell asked at last.

"Yeah," Rose said. "He… specialises in diplomacy. We travel a lot."

Dr Mitchell licked his lips and tentatively put forward the burning query, "Why is his physiology so unusual?"

Rose knew he wouldn't believe any story she made up, and besides, she felt too drained to fabricate new fantasies. "Dunno," she shrugged, watching a neon hotel sign approach and whiz past the car in a streak of blue and green. "He's never told me. It's confidential information. I'm not high ranking enough in M16," she added, for a bit of spice.

"Ah," said Dr Mitchell. He made a strained face like a man trying to figure out if the ringing in his ears is real or imaginary. "All this, er, should I not know it? By that, I mean, you know, are men in black suits going to come knocking on my door at midnight to rub me out?"

Rose closed her eyes and laughed. "Nobody's going to care, I promise," something suddenly occurred to her, and she amended, "as long as you destroy all the records and stuff that show his weirdness, okay?"

He looked severely disappointed. "But, the discovery of our century… the tri-hemisphered brain… the fact that he can even _survive_… it's an incredible neurological… I could…"

Rose gave his arm a slap to shut him up, the way she used to with Mickey. "It's totally vital you destroy those records, got it?"

He nodded miserably.

Rose turned to look at him. "Thank you, by the way. For arriving when you did. I think he was going to kill me."

"It's no problem. Well, it is," he grumbled, "since I'm currently transporting bodies and fraternising with covert agents. But, you know, whatever."

"What were you doing in the hospital at that moment anyway, Mitchell?" she demanded. "Ja-… Dr Zellaby said you were taken in by the police for questioning."

"Yes, that's what I told him," Dr Mitchell said, his voice falling into the haughty, lecturer tone Rose had heard him use over the past couple of days. "I knew Dr Zellaby was trying to cover up Mr Harkness'… difference… and then he began to hint to the police that I was in on the murders, which was obviously _ridiculous_. So I called him from reception to tell him I was going down to the station and might not be back until tomorrow. Then I drove to our sister hospital across the city to find out if Dr Zellaby had been involved in anything else that was… dodgy."

Rose leaned forward without even realising she had done so. "And what did you find?" she asked eagerly.

He didn't take his eyes off the road, but his mouth became a line as flat as a disconnected heart monitor. "Dr Michael Zellaby has been missing for three days. His wife was found dead in their apartment yesterday morning."

Rose gasped. "With her brains leaking out her ears?"

Dr Mitchell shook his head. "No. Stabbed over forty times. But there's more. I went to talk to some of his colleagues. Dr Zellaby is supposed to retire in a few months. He's seventy-six years old."

"Jesus," Rose croaked. She remembered the body's changing face. Sometimes it looked like Jack, sometimes like a man far older… there was the grey in his hair… but how was the original Dr Zellaby an alien? He had a wife. He must have been a doctor for many years. How long had this shapeshifter been trapped on earth? The doppelganger in the TARDIS gave the impression she'd only been there a very short time. Were the new shapeshifters a rescue party gone wrong?

"I rushed back to the hospital," Dr Mitchell narrated proudly, "meaning to confront the impostor and call the police, but by that time he'd already gone – and your Peter Harkness with him."

"This is such a _mess_," Rose groaned, rubbing the bridge of her nose.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Dr Mitchell said, raising his hand for attention. "Your mother's at the police station. They took her in to 'help with enquiries' after you and Mr Harkness disappeared. I think it's a sort of hostage situation."

"_What?_" shrieked Rose.

"Don't worry, she's perfectly alright-"

_THUMP. _Dr Mitchell jumped and the car swerved a few feet across the centre line.

"Shit!" Rose spun around in her seat. "He's awake."

_THUMP_.

"Sh-should I pull over?" Dr Mitchell blabbered, his eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror. "I don't think I'm up to hitting him again."

"No – no, keep driving."

_THUMP_.

Rose, watching out the back window, saw the lid of the boot fly up. She rapidly switched her attention to the nearest wing mirror, just the way the camera always does in movies, or else the audience wouldn't be able to see what was going on. (It was a good trick, because unlike rear-view mirrors – which are commonly obscured by the sinister face of the unwelcome passenger in the back seat – you can _always_ see something happening in wing mirrors – unless your vehicle is stationary and you are waiting for someone to appear in the damp alley wherein you are parked, or the mirror has been knocked off during a car chase. Rose made a mental note to ask the Doctor why the TARDIS didn't have wing mirrors.)

In the wing mirror, she saw a man-shaped figure rolling along the street behind them, then leaping to his feet and running in the opposite direction. Or perhaps he was jogging on the spot. It was hard to tell because it was dark and the car was still moving.

"_Stop!_" she yelled.

Dr Mitchell was not experienced in car chases. Instead of slamming on the brakes with a squeal of tyres, he just took his foot off the accelerator, looked at her wide-eyed and said, "What?"

"_U-turn! Now!_" she bellowed.

This time he did better. He gritted his teeth, momentarily calculating his next move without changing to direction of the car. Then he grabbed the handbrake, wrenched it up, spun the wheel, shoved it down again, and pressed his foot so hard to the accelerator that the laws of physics compounded to throw Rose back against the sheepskin seat covering. The overall result was that the car turned very tightly, very fast, leaving a black U-shape of burned rubber on the road behind them.

"There! He's there!" Rose pointed. "_Go faster!_"

The man who had been in their boot was running down the middle of the road. A car shot past in the other direction, the driver leaning on the horn.

"Jesus Christ," Dr Mitchell whispered. He was glancing from the dials on the dashboard to their quarry in the road ahead. The speedometer was reading _60 mph_. But they were barely keeping up. The man – alien, thing, who _knew_ – was running at almost a hundred kilometres an hour.

Without slowing down, their quarry veered right and shot down a side street. Rose didn't have to yell to make Dr Mitchell react as he twisted the wheel to follow. The shapeshifter was running on the pavement, slightly slower.

"He's going to disappear into the first open gate he sees," Rose cried through gritted teeth. "We have to stop him."

"We can't!" Dr Mitchell said breathlessly. "Unless you want to lean out the window and hit him with something."

Rose felt something awful click into place in the back of her brain. She felt sick. She felt horror at herself. But she said the words anyway. "Run him down."

"No," said Dr Mitchell quietly.

"He's going to go after the Doctor. He's going to finish whatever it is he's started. _Run him down_."

"No."

A sign whizzed past – Rose saw the word _Botanic Gardens, 200m_ and knew this was the shapeshifter's chance. He would vanish into the park and they would not be able to follow him.

Perhaps knowing that freedom was seconds away, the shapeshifter's head turned around, much further than a human head could possibly go. The rest of the body did not slow down, but his eyes grotesquely locked on to Rose.

In that moment, she felt herself blasted by hatred. The shapeshifter's expression, wrought unnaturally on Jack's handsome features, was beyond description. It was pure disgust, fury, misery, loathing and the promise of vengeance.

Rose reacted to it by grabbing the wheel of the car and pulling it round. The wheels mounted the curb with a violent jolt and the headlights illuminated the face of an old, agonised man, not Jack at all.

"_No!_" Dr Mitchell screamed, hitting the brakes. Then the impact crushed them both into their seatbelts. They slammed into the old man and stopped, half-on and half-off the pavement. The car spluttered and stalled. There was silence, but for the hot metal bonnet creaking.

Dr Mitchell fumbled for his seatbelt and staggered out onto the street. Rose saw him hurry around the car and kneel by the headlights. She was shaking so much she could barely get the door open before she, too, tumbled out of the car.

The body of the old man lay partway under the car. Bits of him were sticking in the wrong direction. Rose forced herself to look. She had done this. She couldn't formulate any thought just yet.

"He's dead." Dr Mitchell whispered.

"Get back," Rose croaked.

He looked up at her, teeth bared. "Don't you order me-"

"_No, get away!_" Rose grabbed him and dragged him away from the corpse, which had started to twitch. From beneath it appeared an armless, fluid shape, exuding a pulsating green-blue glow that did not lend its light to anything around it. It looked almost like the after-image that lingered on the retina after a flash in a darkened room. It silently wriggled away from the corpse, snapping thin tendrils that connected it to the old man's flesh.

"It's a parasite," said Dr Mitchell. He sounded less horrified and more curious.

"Take off your coat – we have to catch it, quick!" Rose hissed.

But even as the doctor slid out of his jacket and Rose snatched it and spread it into a net, the creature scuttled away down the sidewalk on tiny appendages. Rose broke into a sprint to catch it, but it vanished into the gate of the botanic gardens. Beneath the trees there wasn't enough light to see more than a couple of feet.

She swore and trundled back. Dr Mitchell sat down on the crumpled bonnet of his car.

He was looking down at the body of the old man. "Will you tell the courts you did that?" he asked in a soft and shivering voice.

Rose thrust his coat into his arms. "This isn't going to the courts, alright? See if the car will start, I need to get to the rugby club as soon as possible. We take the body to the Doctor, yeah? He'll figure our next move out."

Dr Mitchell glowered at her. "You've killed someone. An esteemed surgeon. Now I don't know what he'd done, whether he committed those murders or not, but even if he did, how do you think you're going to get him tried and convicted for them? He's _dead_. Esteemed surgeons run down by hooligans _don't get charged with murder_ – the hooligans do, _and_ their two-hearted nutcase boyfriends. You have to go to the police."

This time he didn't stammer as he spoke. Rose refused to meet his eyes. She tried to counter his speech. "I'm not letting them get their hands on the Doctor, I mean Peter. I have to go and find him before I do anything else."

"Fine," he said, straightening up and throwing his hands in the air. "But you can walk there, because I'm not participating in this any longer."

"Fine," she shrugged. "I'll call a cab, and _you_ can deal with the body."

He was going to obey her sooner or later. She knew he was. It felt awful to be obeyed.

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They reached the rugby club about ten o'clock that evening. By that time Rose's stomach had lost its nausea at the events of the night and was reminding her that she hadn't taken up the offer of McDonald's when she'd had the chance on the bus. Dr Mitchell hadn't spoken a word to her on the way back. As they pulled into the drive, bits of his bumper fell off. She wondered if the Doctor could go back in time and take out extra insurance on his car.

Outside the rugby club every parking space was packed, though the rowdy crowd was just streaming out onto the street. The game must have just finished. Rose wondered vaguely who won. Her apathy disappeared a moment later: sitting outside the door of the club was a long, sleek black vehicle that would be better described as a steel panther than a car. Rose felt her gloomy thoughts recede. That vehicle could only be transport for one person.

Harriet Jones was in the foyer, talking amiably with the student captain and three of the team, all of whom were very pink in the face, sweating like fountains and grinning like baboons. One of them noticed Rose and hailed her, punching his fist in the air with a grunty cheer.

"We won, Rose!" the captain called. "And look! Look who came! We didn't believe you until, well, _wow!_" he was pointing at Harriet Jones, which (Rose mused) eighty years ago would have been enough to get him arrested, because (as the Doctor had told her that when she had tried to point at Arch Duke Ferdinand) its rude to point.

She did her best to smile and look pleased, but it was difficult when she was so busy scanning the room for her Doctor. The foyer was almost empty, but there was no sign of him.

She felt a dignified hand on her elbow and found herself being lead into a private corner by Harriet Jones, to a chorus of, "Bye miss!" from the players. The prime minister gave them a genial wave and then turned to Rose without a trace of pleasantries on her face.

"I've told them I came to see the football," she said briskly. "I told them it was a PR thing. Getting in touch with the nation's youth and masses, that sort of thing. I had to," she snapped, "when you didn't turn up."

Rose rubbed her head. "How'd you even find this place?"

"I called your phone and one of those young men answered. They said you'd disappeared. I had to wait for you. You may feel it appropriate to _abandon_ your responsibilities…"

Rose reflected that she should probably be very honoured to be spoken to by the Prime Minister as if Harriet Jones were her mother. Nevertheless, she cut her off. "I'm sorry, really I am, but something came up," she pressed her fingertips to her eyes at the frustration of not being able to convey all that had happened. "Is he talking yet?"

"Who?"

"_The Doctor, of course!_"

Harriet Jones gave her a very majestic scowl. "I don't know. He's gone into the box."

"Yeah. Of course. Thanks," Rose turned and sprinted for the room at the back where she had left the TARDIS.

The sight of that homely blue booth washed all the horrors of what she had done that night out of her mind. She pushed open the doors and smiled up at the towering beams that upheld the alien patterned ceiling.

"Doctor?" Rose called. She expected to see him step out from behind the console, trailing his fingers across the buttons and levers, grinning madly to her. But there was no reply.

"Oi, where are you?" she trotted up the clattering walkway. "Doctor?"

She caught a glimpse of an unfamiliar sneaker peeking out from under the console. Rose leaned down and saw that it was attached to a leg clad in hideous maroon, but recognisably skinny. She knelt and saw the rest of him.

The Doctor was sitting under the lip of the console, his neck bent at an awkward angle in order to fit. He had opened up a small panel above his head, exposing a tangle of wires and computer components. Rose had seen the Doctor working on this particular panel many times during their travels – it was a troublesome piece of hardware. To testify to the hasty repairs he had often made to it, the board was plastered with carelessly dripped solder, sticking plasters, hardened resin, and several somethings resembling copper paperclips.

Right now, he was simply tracing one sello-taped wire with his index finger, following its snake-trail in and out of the other bunches of wire and up into the heart of the console. He didn't look up as she settled herself cross-legged beside him.

"Hello," Rose said. The Doctor still didn't respond.

She heard footsteps and twisted around to find Harriet Jones standing above her, hands clasped at her stomach, watching the Doctor.

"Hasn't… hasn't he started talking at all?" Rose asked, disappointed already chewing at her relief.

The Prime Minister shook her head. She raised her face to the towering column of the time rotor. Possibly this was the first time she had stepped into the TARDIS – though she was handling its revelation very calmly. She said, "When we arrived here, he went straight to the box. He made a lot of small whimpering noises, but nothing intelligible. He was very distressed."

"I thought the TARDIS would fix him," Rose groaned, curling up and pressing her forehead to her knees.

"I think he did as well."

Rose, who was still hiding her face against her knees so that the head of state would not see her crying silently like some silly little bint, heard Harriet Jones sigh and say, "I have to get back to my duties. I…" there was the briefest pause, "…hope I will see you both again."

Her footsteps diminished and Rose heard the TARDIS door close softly.

Rose allowed herself the liberty of raising her head to wipe away the tears. The Doctor was still fiddling with the guts of the open panel. Rose longed to elucidate a reaction from him, anything that would show he knew she existed and was still here for him. She resisted the urge to clutch his arm and press her head against his shoulder. Instead she got to her feet and leaned on the edge of the console.

"Stop thinking about _you_," she told herself, staring at a dead computer screen perched on the console. "Stop wanting him back for your own sake."

At that moment, the computer screen buzzed and woke up. Glaring blue filled it, making Rose squint. As she watched, indecipherable symbols blinked into existence and beside her, the Doctor rose to his feet. He was clutching a long rectangular board, attached to the screen by streamers of flat wires. He dropped the board on the console with a clatter and Rose saw it was covered in about two hundred square, flat buttons, each embossed with a strange symbol: an alien keyboard.

She held her breath as the Doctor reached out to the glowing screen and tapped the message it displayed: at once, they vanished, and two long boxes appeared against the blue.

For the first time since she had entered the TARDIS, the Doctor looked Rose in the eye. He raised his eyebrows and held up one hand. His forth and middle fingers were crossed. He took a breath, placed his hands over the strange keyboard and began to type.

On the screen, Rose watched a message in an unfamiliar alphabet slowly form in the top box. Finally there was a pause. The console hummed thoughtfully, and then words appeared in the lower box.

DID YOU KNOW THAT EVERY CORPOREAL, INTELLEGIANT SPECIES IN THE UNIVERSE CROSSES ITS APPENDAGES FOR LUCK?

Rose's jaw dropped and began to grin. She glanced at the Doctor. He held up his crossed fingers once more. She nodded. The two languages on the screen disappeared and he began typing again. After a few seconds, the English words appeared underneath.

THIS TRANSLATOR IS VERY BASIC, A CHILD'S TOY DESIGNED FOR THE BRITISH LANGUAGE OF THE LATE NINETEEN FIFTIES. MY USE OF MY MOTHERTONGUE HAS CHANGED A LOT SINCE THE PROGRAM WAS WRITTEN. IT ONLY WORKS ONE WAY AND IT WON'T BE ABLE TO COPE WITH EVERYTHING I TRY TO SAY.

She nodded without taking her eyes off the screen. Again, the words cleared away and new ones appeared.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO ME

He stopped typing: Rose saw that his fingers were trembling. She put her hand over his until they were steady again. He laughed, but even that seemed to be lost in the translation – it was a quiet chuckle, far removed from the guffaw she knew so well. A new message appeared.

MY FOURTH SELF HAD A BRILLIANT BARITONE VOICE. HUMAN EARS NEVER HEARD ME SING. BUT I USED TO MAKE UP RUDE SONGS TO FOR A FRIEND I HAD AT THE TIME.

Rose frowned, glancing at his face, which was focused on the screen. Fourth self? She couldn't believe that meant what she thought it meant. His change, after she had destroyed the Daleks… that hadn't been the first time?

The screen cleared and a new message appeared.

MY THIRD SELF WAS SO ATHLETIC; HE COULD DO ALL SORTS OF GYMNASTIC TRICKS. I TAUGHT MYSELF TO PLAY THE PIPE BEFORE THAT. MY FIFTH SELF WAS DOUBLE-JOINTED. ONE OF MY OTHER SELVES HAD AN EXQUISITE TASTE IN WINE. BUT NOW WHAT I DO IS TALK.

Rose read everything with great bewilderment, trying to process what he was telling her. Maybe, she wondered, the translator was broken. The voice in the words was gloomy, nostalgic, and it was wildly revealing of information he had always avoided before – this wasn't her Doctor, was it? This wasn't what he was really _like_, was it?

The screen was wiped clean and once more the Doctor typed up his strange language. This time the computer hummed for much longer. At last, a short message blinked into existence.

CONTAINS UNKNOWN TERM AND/OR PHRASE. REPHRASE?

Rose turned to the Doctor, but he was staring fiercely at his hands. At last, putting pressure on each key, he tried again. This time the message was his own, but it made even less sense and was accompanied by an angry triplicate of question marks. Rose was reminded in some horrible way of the diary of the psychopath in a B-grade horror movie. The screen read:

IT IS MY THOUGHTS???

When she glanced at the Doctor, he sighed and slid down to the floor, sitting with one lanky leg stretched out. He turned his head up to look at her, waiting for her to understand his message.

_It is… it is…_

"This is up to me," Rose hissed to herself. "I have to fix this. He can't help me this time. _Think_," she closed her eyes. "_Think_."

That was when she remembered that the shapeshifter with her face was still on the ship.

------------------------------------------

She found it in the wardrobe room. She heard it crying and tore back a rack of fur coats to find her doppelganger curled between a crate of shoes and a pillar of the TARDIS, weeping into its palms.

Once upon a time, Rose had looked into the heart of the ship and lost herself to the flood of omnipotence. Then, her thoughts had been both minutely calculated and totally instinctual; she had known exactly what must be done and exactly how to do it, but there was no conscious mind behind the actions, simply power, totally overwhelming the Rose of everyday life.

This was a lot like that, except this time, Rose hadn't looked into the TARDIS, she had just gotten very, very angry.

"Get up," she said in a needle-thin voice.

The doppelganger's head snapped up to look at her and it seemed to shrink into the corner like a sea anemone into rock.

"Get up," repeated Rose, stepping through the rack of coats and grabbing the girl by the lapels. She hauled it to its feet. The doppelganger didn't make a sound, but pressed itself against the pillar.

"Tell me everything," Rose hissed, leaning forward and putting a claw-shaped handed on each of the doppelganger's shoulders. "I know you know what has happened to him, now _tell me_."

The doppelganger had gone as pale as Jackie when she wore too much foundation in bad lighting. Tears were trickling out of its eyes – out of the eyes that were _Rose's_ eyes – and Rose snarled.

"Are you afraid of him? Is that why you did this?"

The girl's bottom lip shivered.

"_How many of you are there?_"

The doppelganger's face broke into sobbing. "T-two."

Almost surprised that her interrogation had gained an answer, Rose loosened her grip. "Two? Is that all of you?" She frowned, remembering her conclusion that the Dr Zellaby shapeshifter had been on earth for years. "Did you come here alone?"

The girl, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth open in perfect mimicry of Rose in the wracks of misery, shook her head. She gasped a breath and croaked. "There w-were three and n-now there's two. Mum's dead."

Hearing her own voice, Rose's thoughts leapt instantly for Jackie. Her hands opened and the doppelganger slid to the ground, leaning on the wardrobe crate, its throaty sobs fogging up Rose's brain. She corrected herself quickly. Jackie was at the police station – not comfortable, but protected by a building full of officers. The shapeshifter was talking about its own mother.

Rose knelt and roughly turned the doppelganger so she could see its face. "Was she here, on the ship?"

The doppelganger shook her head.

"Then how do you know?" Rose snapped.

The girl hiccoughed. "She screamed in my mind and then she was gone."

Telepaths. Shapeshifting telepaths. As if Rose didn't have enough on her plate already. She closed her eyes for a moment to get her bearings and remembered her earlier conversations with the doppelganger.

"You said something before about your grandmother, yeah?" Rose shook the girl to make sure she was paying attention. "Didn't you? Can you hear her in your mind as well? Are you in contact with her?"

The doppelganger nodded slowly, wide-eyed and not sobbing now.

"Where is she?"

The girl swallowed and whispered, "She's coming to find me. She's coming to find the Time Lord who will help us save everyone. She saw who killed my mother and she's going to find them and kill _them_."

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	12. This Is Beginning to be Mad

Hahaha, remember when I said this story was a humour fic? Man, what happened? I wish I could get some consistency in my writing.

IT'S SO LATE I KNOW I deserve to be hung drawn and quartered. OTOH, this chapter is just in time to celebrate the beginning of the new season! Glorious! Though I'll remind you that in NZ we don't get the new season until August, so feel free to expostulate its glory _without_ spoiling. And no, I'm not going to go and watch it on YouTube, because shrinking the Doctor down to that size is cruel.

-------------------------------------

Prior to certain life-altering encounters with aliens, Rose Tyler had never looked forward to being a mother. Not even a _little_ bit. She had never seen the appeal in training and caring for a needy, noisy, stupid miniature of oneself. But trailing after the Doctor for months on end had awoken fragments of her hibernating maternal instincts. Maybe it was the low survival probability that made her want to procreate – maybe Cassandra was right and she just liked his bum in pinstripes. Either way, unconsciously or just secretly, compatible plumbing or no, Rose Tyler had begun to rather fancy the idea of babies.

Now, faced with an actual needy, noisy, stupid miniature of herself, Rose remembered just why she'd hated the idea in the first place.

As the doppelganger's words were processed by her already-exhausted brain, Rose felt the blood drain from her face and wished she'd had a chance to put on makeup this morning.

"What else has she told you?" she croaked. "Tell me! Did your grandmother tell you who killed your mother?"

The doppelganger shook its Rose-faced head. The real Rose, who felt as if concrete was pumping through her arteries and solidifying her limbs, relaxed a little.

Why had she reacted like that? It wasn't her. How could it be? She hadn't killed – well, alright, she _had_, she had killed someone, but they had been human. The alien had escaped. Unless… no, the escaping glow-creature had definitely been alive… oh, God, this was insane, she didn't know _anything_ about alien physiology. How was it that she could have killed an alien without realising? She needed the Doctor, or a good intergalactic encyclopaedia.

The shapeshifter's voice cut into her thoughts. The girl was rubbing the tears from her eyes as she said, "Grandmother says to tell you that," she gave a hiccough-squeak, "To tell you 'a mother for a mother.'"

An eye for an eye. A life for a life.

Jackie.

There was a pause. A heavy bell tolled once in Rose's brain. _She shouldn't have said that_, Rose said to herself. _I was just beginning to calm down. _

"What does she mean?" The doppelganger asked, her watery eyes wide and glinting like an animal's – Rose's eyes, right down to a heavy layer of mascara, but so much younger and stranger.

Rose didn't answer. She grabbed the girl's arm and dragged her out of the wardrobe room. The shapeshifter didn't try to pull out of her grasp, but stumbled and cried for Rose to slow down. _I'm going to be a terrible mother, _Rose thought. _But I don't want to be a terrible daughter. _

--------------------------------------

In the console room, the Doctor shot upright when Rose stormed through. He saw the doppelganger and his jaw dropped – if they'd been in a state for conversation, Rose would have told him not to be such a drama-queen.

"It's y-you!" whispered the not-human girl. "The Time Lord! Grandmother _said_ you were real. No one believed her!" She strained towards the Doctor, but he shrunk away from her, a look of disbelief on his face. This didn't seem to deter the girl: it took all of Rose's strength to keep her from jumping on him.

"_Rose!_" the Doctor gulped, pointing at the other alien. He made an expression which said, very clearly, _I know what that is, and I hope you have a _really_ good explanation as to why it's on my ship_.

She glanced at him and without letting go of the shapeshifter pulled the TARDIS key from around her neck. She mimed turning it in a keyhole. "You," she snapped at him. "Stay here. _Stay_. I'm locking the door so no one can get in."

He shook his head in confusion and pointed at the doppelganger again.

Rose jabbed her finger at the door. "Jackie," she said. "I have to get Jackie."

She jerked on the doppelganger's arm and strode down the gangway towards the door.

"I can't go outside," the doppelganger moaned. "Mum said I had to stay on the ship no matter what. Please, let me go!"

Rose felt her anger and fear ebb and slow. She turned and loosened her grip on the girl's arm. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "But I need you to help me save _my_ mum."

The doppelganger wiped her nose with the back of her hand, gullible and oblivious to Rose's identity and intention. "W-what's going to happen to her?"

"Someone… is going to hurt her," Rose tried to explain. "Like your mother got hurt."

She almost cracked when she said that. A murderer of mothers _and_ a deceiver of children. This was the most iniquitous day she'd had in her life. _Is this how _he_ felt? When he told the Nestene Consciousness to leave Earth? When the Gelth begged him to save them? When the Dalek told him they were one and the same? Is this how it feels to be a killer consorting with your victim? _

She sighed, suddenly remembering a geyser of gold and a dying friend who had smiled without regret in the last moment before the conflagration consumed him. She'd always thought that smile had been intended for her. Now she thought, _no wonder he changed to escape it._

---------------------------------------

Harriet Jones left the rugby club, but didn't go far. She had the car drive around the corner and then park in a particularly shadowy part of the street. Leaning back against the exquisite leather seat, she put one hand to her mouth for a moment and then quickly sat up straight and composed herself. A decision had to be made.

"Would you like a drink there, ma'am?" the driver asked over his shoulder. "Just a small one. ˇThey keep some very good stuff in this car, for diplomats and the like."

"That's very good to know, but no thank you, Hamish," the Prime Minister replied.

She had not sat twiddling her thumbs between the Doctor's visits. Becoming Prime Minister took up a lot of time, but there were always moments to spare on the secret of code 9. She had found the old UNIT files, kept in locked darkness with no one alive who knew the password to the archives. She'd read about this Doctor in more detail then he probably remembered himself.

"Samson called while you were away from the car, by the way," the driver continued amicably. "Things are piling up back at the office, but he wants you to know he's on top of it."

_That makes one of us_, Harriet Jones thought. "He's a reliable fellow. Better give him a call," she said briskly, picking up the receiver of the satellite phone set into the doorhandle of the car. She dialled her own extension and Samson's voice answered cheerily.

"Hello, ma'am!" he cried when she greeted him. "Thank God you're coming back, people are starting to comment on the length of your afternoon tea."

There was a simple rule of thumb for the Doctor's arrival: danger. The UNIT files never said so directly, like a party host too polite to comment on a guest arriving drunk, but Harriet Jones could hear the warning bursting from between the lines. It trickled ahead of him and trailed in his wake and crashed like a tsunami after the quiet shudder of the earth. If the Doctor was on their planet, so was something else.

"Samson, I need you to break the seal and call the emergency numbers."

The cheer evaporated. Harriet Jones' assistant did exactly what she had hired him for and turned instantaneously from docile receptionist to someone more likely to be found at the head of MI5. "Is there some trouble? Don't worry Ms Jones, I've had a car tailing you from the moment you left Downing Street. Just stay silent and I'll know to send in the troops, we'll extract you in a jiffy-"

"No, no, Samson I'm not in any trouble," Harriet Jones cut him off with the images of her self being 'extracted' from a violent fire-fight leaping to the forefront of her mind. "In fact, I don't know for certain if there's any threat at all. I simply – well, let's just say I've just discovered one of Earth's most unorthodox lines of defence has been put out of action and I do not want to be caught off my guard."

Samson paused. "_Earth's_ lines of defence, ma'am?"

"I know I'm not making much sense. I just need to you to call Torchwood and tell them that… tell them that the Doctor is in but he's sick. They're to look for the source of the illness and be ready when I call them again. If they can't do anything with that, they don't deserve what we're paying them."

"Prime Minister, you sound like M!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"From James Bond, ma'am, you know… never mind."

"Quite. I'll be back in a short while, so…"

Harriet Jones jumped and almost dropped the receiver as a body thumped against the window and looked in at her, grinning.

---------------------------------------

Dr Mitchell sat on the back steps of the rugby club, staring at the crumpled bonnet of his car. He played with the clasps of his briefcase and periodically rubbed his mouth and chin, dearly craving the cigarettes that he hadn't touched for over fifteen years. Rose had abandoned him out here, he knew with bitter certainty. At this very moment, she was probably whisking away on a large, black motorbike, heading for either another spree of criminal activity or further covert operations in the service of whichever world power employed her. Dr Mitchell had not decided yet whether Rose was a secret agent or a liar, but he suspected both.

His gaze roamed over his mutilated car and seemed to pierce the boot, visualising the corpse crumpled inside. Dr Mitchell felt another wave of nausea. He should drive straight to the nearest police station and tell them everything he had seen, heard and learned. Yet here he sat. Out of fear of arrest? Out of loyalty to Rose? He would have gladly admitted either, but he was too strait-laced to lie to himself. It was curiosity that kept him here.

He had to know how a man's face could change from young to old when you hit him at forty miles an hour. How anyone could survive with two hearts and a brain like no animal on earth. What the origin was of that mangled _thing_ that had been attacking Rose when he'd entered his office, the thing now scraped into the wastepaper bin and dumped in the boot of his car.

It wasn't that he hated not knowing – it was just that the scent of knowledge was overwhelming all his good sense.

The more he thought about the mysteries, the more Dr Mitchell's bitterness faded. He began to ponder the paradoxes presented to him.

First, the body in the car was the body of the real Michael Zellaby, he knew, since he had gotten a good look at the corpse when he'd been squashing it into the boot. Yet when that body had been alive, every inch of it had been the body of a young American man (and here Dr Mitchell recalled Rose's initial reaction to Zellaby, in the hospital, and the name she'd given him – "Jack.") And, during unconsciousness, the body's shimmering face had somehow been both Zellaby _and_ Jack.

Secondly, the impossible physiology of Rose's boyfriend Peter Harkness. Rose obviously knew the truth about his abnormalities, yet refused to reveal it – instead she had fed the neurosurgeon a pack of nonsense. So, if Dr Mitchell assumed that everything she had told him was a lie, all he had to do was remove all the possibilities she had given and see what was left.

She had said he was the result of government experiments – so he wasn't. She had said that it was all the result of natural mutation – so it couldn't be. At one point she'd even claimed that he was a patchwork of complex surgery like Frankenstein's monster – so Dr Mitchell could rule out organ transplantation as well. What options did that leave? There was simply no possible medical explanation for such strange anatomy in any living human being, which meant…

Dr Mitchell shook his head and thought about the next mystery.

Thirdly, there were the seven identical murders and the face of their killer captured on film: Peter Harkness again – _despite_ the fact that the last two deaths had occurred while Peter Harkness was supposed to be detained in hospital. At first Dr Mitchell's deductive reason told him that Peter Harkness had killed those final two victims after he had locked himself in his room on that first night and when he had escaped the next night.

But Rose's dogmatic insistence of his innocence made Mitchell think twice. The sixth victim had been found a few hours outside of London, dead for several hours prior to that – how had Peter Harkness killed her and returned to central London in time to fall victim to the stroke that had drawn Mitchell into this whole mess? And how, mere hours after escaping hospital and with his face on the front page of every newspaper, had he walked into a secure police station and murdered the school caretaker under the noses of dozens of cops?

Rose had to be right. Peter Harkness was, at the least, innocent of the two most recent murders and had nothing to link him to the other five. Dr Mitchell pulled open his briefcase and lifted on his copy of the front page with the infamous photograph of the "murderer". So how had Harkness' face gotten in front of that camera? It was _clearly_ his face, albeit slightly blurred and (weirdly) wearing his victim's clothing…

Dr Mitchell felt his brain leap from the logical into the insane.

And there was Dr Zellaby – well, _Jack's_ – slanderous efforts to prevent the police interviewing Peter Harkness – Rose's claim that he had even _kidnapped_ Harkness right before the caretaker's death – whoever the man was, he was desperate to pin the deed on Harkness, yet Rose had said "I'm not letting _them_ get their hands on Peter". Conspiracy, kidnapping, nameless men, murder… but not… no, that was ridiculous…

Dr Mitchell snapped his briefcase shut, rocketed to his feet and bolted into the rugby club. "Rose!" He cried. "Rose!"

She was just coming into the foyer; he careened past two burly students heading off to their hotel and grabbed Rose's shoulders.

"Are they aliens?" he panted. "Please, tell me I'm insane, but I can't see how this could be human technology – _are they aliens?_"

She raised one eyebrow and he briefly considered whether he _had_ gone insane, but she answered, "You took your time figuring it out. Duh."

"And they're shapeshifters, am I right? All except your Peter?" he asked, voice quivering, holding her gaze steady.

Now she was surprised. "Yeah. That's right."

"And – in the wastepaper basket – that was one as well, wasn't it?"

Rose lips parted. She glanced over her shoulder, back into the hallway at something Dr Mitchell couldn't see. Then she leaned through, said to someone out of sight, "Stay there for one minute, got that?" and pulled the door shut. When she turned back to him, her face was terrified.

"That's it," she whispered, leaning against the door. "That's what I killed."

She slid down the door, her hoodie bunching up against her back, staring vacantly at a rugby trophy on the far wall. Dr Mitchell, his elation at having solved the riddle wilting, stood awkwardly to one side, too nervous to touch her.

"I just thought it was a sort of thing. A plant or a fleshy machine or something," Rose murmured, as if to herself. "And it was somebody's mother."

"Well, look, I don't know if we can presume that much…" Dr Mitchell said earnestly, in his best cheering-up-terminally-ill-patients voice.

"It was," she ran her fingers through her fringe. "I've met the daughter. Jesus Christ, I orphaned somebody."

Dr Mitchell leaned down and took hold of her arm. "It was going to kill you," he said.

Rose looked up at him. Dr Mitchell could see that she wasn't any sort of secret agent. She wasn't a criminal either. She was probably the only human in this mess. Well, he'd be damned if he left a fellow human fighting the good fight alone in an interplanetary war.

"Come on," he grunted, pulling her to her feet. "You've got to tell me what to do next."

This snapped Rose back to life. "My mum!" she snarled at him. "You said you knew where she was, didn't you? That's who it's going after. It wants revenge."

Then she did something rather unexpected. She opened the door, reached back into the hallway and pulled out a small, tear-stained identical twin of herself. This was a rather impressive conjuring trick. Dr Mitchell was speechless.

"We need your car," Rose said, dragging him and the small twin by their sleeves towards the door of the rugby club.

"The bumper fell off," Dr Mitchell protested weakly.

"Trust me, I've been in worse situations," she snapped.

----------------------------------------

Rose decided the doppelganger should sit in the front seat and she took the back. It was not so much for security reasons and more that she wanted the girl as far as possible from the boot wherein lay the unceremonially discarded body of her mother.

"Right," she said firmly, as they pulled out of the gravel driveway and Dr Mitchell's car clattered onto the road. She leaned forward to get the doppelganger's attention. "You're going to tell me everything you know about how you and your grandmother got to this planet. And what the Doc- the Time Lord has to do with it, yeah?"

The girl leaned against the window and fiddled with her seatbelt. "We came 'cos everyone got sick," she shrugged.

"Aliens. This is incredible. Are they relatives of that ship at Christmas? Are they?" Dr Mitchell muttered feverishly.

Rose ignored him and focused on the doppelganger. "Who's everyone? Your family? Your country?" Rose pressed.

Her twin shrugged again.

"Think hard! How did you get here?" Rose ordered.

"Hush up," Dr Mitchell frowned at her. "You'd make an awful doctor."

"Thanks," Rose said with heavy sarcasm.

Dr Mitchell glanced at the young shapeshifter. "What's your name?" he asked.

The look of affection the doppelganger gave him made Rose cringe. She hadn't meant to be so rude. She wasn't normally like this, was she? It was the Doctor's job to be rude. Rose did the soothing and fraternising with frightened civilians and household servants. Normally.

"You can't say it with these organs," the girl said. "Rose calls me 'doppelganger'. I don't know what it means but it sounds ok."

"I've never called you doppelganger!" Rose said indignantly.

"In your head," the girl replied.

Rose felt shock ripple through her. "You can read my mind?" But then surely the girl would know what she had done…

The doppelganger shrugged again. "No. Just bits. Those are the only two words I could pick up. Also that you call the Time Lord 'Doctor' and you know that he's going to die unless you can fix what's wrong with him."

Rose stared at her, but her twin was still absent-mindedly pulling the seatbelt in and out of its cradle. She hadn't thought that consciously. "Hey," she grabbed the girl's arm. "He's not gonna die. Why would he die?"

"He needs his ship. It's killing him to be separate from her. You know that. I saw it in your head," the girl said, shaking off Rose's hand.

Dr Mitchell cleared his throat. "So, er, young lady. Rose tells me you're a shapeshifter?"

He must have figured this out himself, as Rose hadn't said any such thing.

The doppelganger beamed proudly. "That's why I look like Rose and not like me. I'm prettier like me. There weren't many others like me… I mean, the sickness makes people look ugly. My cousins got it and they looked ugly and died. And Mum," her smile vanished and she mumbled. "Mum too. Gran's still pretty."

Dr Mitchell nodded sagely, but when his eyes met Rose's they were grim. "Rose, can you think of any ugly or pretty things we've seen recently? In my wastepaper basket, or on the street under my car?"

Rose realised what he was on about, and with exaggerated confusion, replied, "No, Dr Mitchell, I don't think we've seen anything like that."

"Oh. We'll just have to keep looking," the doctor answered, leaning across to pat the doppelganger's shoulder reassuringly. He glared at Rose as he did it.

"What?" she snapped.

"Nothing," he grumbled.

She stuck her head between the two forward seats in order to confront him. "This isn't my fault!"

"I'm thinking of me, actually," he said icily. "And what shame I'm bringing to the medical profession." His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. "We're going to rescue your mother, understand, Rose? No more deaths."

"You think I _want_ that?" she could only resist the urge to smack him by reminding herself that he was driving.

"What? Why are you both so guilty?" the doppelganger asked. Rose wondered if she'd picked that up with her telepathy.

"Nothing, sweetie," Rose said without taking her eyes of Dr Mitchell.

----------------------------------------

"Prime Minister? Are you alright? Hold on, ma'am, I'm sending in my men…"

Harriet Jones was trying to tell her driver to get back into the car and take his gun away from the Doctor's head. She whipped the phone back to her ear and snapped, "Stop that, Samson, I'm perfectly alright. I'll see you in a few minutes."

"…Yes, ma'am."

"And Samson? Next time I tell you my trip is confidential, _don't_ have me followed or I _will_ have to take some rather harsh punitive action."

"Fair cop, ma'am."

The Doctor (a few moments prior) had appeared out of the shadows by the road and, like a puppy seeing its owner arrive home, had bounded over to the tinted-glass window – apparently tinted glass had no effect on him and he was looking straight through it at Harriet Jones. He waited, grinning, for the prime minister to sort out the bristling armed driver.

"Hamish, it's fine, it's _fine_," she called, putting the phone back on its hook and pushing the door open.

The driver glared at the eccentrically dressed maniac but holstered his weapon and stepped back. The Doctor had obviously been waiting for this, because he broke into chatter instantaneously. Harriet Jones made out the word 'Rose' and a gesture that seemed to mean 'nailed my foot to the floor'. He continued in his charades for almost a minute without any sign of slowing down. The Prime Minister, who felt as if she was listening to Lassie barking out that Timmy was trapped down the old mine shaft, could only decipher a sense of impending danger from the babble.

"Stop it," she snapped at last. The Doctor fell silent. Harriet Jones got back into the car. "Come on. Get in."

He gave her another Lassie-reminiscent smile and climbed into the car after her.

"Downing Street, Hamish. Whatever he has to tell us, I'm not going to figure it all out on my own. But can we do our best not to be seen?"

----------------------------------------

Rose, Dr Mitchell and the Doppelganger sat in the car, watching the police station from half a block away.

"Have you called her cellphone?" Dr Mitchell asked.

"Twice. It's turned off," Rose replied.

"Why can't your species listen for each other's thoughts?" The doppelganger asked.

"Because it's rude, yeah?" Rose hissed at her.

"Don't snap at her, Rose. And I'm not driving any closer," the doctor declared. "I don't need my number plate to be associated with you."

"I think it fell off miles back," Rose told him. "Are you absolutely sure this is the right station?"

"Of course not. They could have taken her somewhere else. But it was the right station last night when they took your mum into custody."

The headlights of a car swept around the corner and the three of them ducked down until it was gone.

"Alright, I'm just going to go in there and ask them if they're holding her," Rose sighed.

'I'm not coming in," Dr Mitchell said at once, like a child yelling 'bags not!' when asked by a teacher to complete a particularly distasteful task.

"I know, I know. Just drive round the block or something, okay? I'll call you when I need you to pick us up."

She got out of the car, shivering in the chill air. Dr Mitchell leaned across and grabbed her sleeve. His voice was strained. "Rose, be careful. That thing could be waiting for you. You don't even have a weapon."

"The Doctor never needs one," Rose shrugged. "You keep driving. Remember that it might be able to outrun your car."

"Oh, yes, because I'd totally forgotten that particular constituent of our mortal peril," he answered sarcastically. A laugh bubbled out of Rose and she hurried off before Dr Mitchell could think she was actually getting used to his company.

-------------------------------------

In hindsight, it hadn't been one of Rose's best ideas to walk straight into the station and announce herself as Jackie Tyler's daughter.

It wasn't that she'd forgotten about the murders. She'd just sort of assumed that someone would believe her when she said she had nothing to do with them and explained that her mother was in danger and had to be taken to safety.

They didn't. They arrested her on the spot, handcuffed her, sat her down in the office with a dozen officers (some of who were obviously rather over-excited at the prospect of making headway in the mystery) and started questioning her.

'Looking, this is bloody mad, _it wasn't me_," Rose protested for the sixteenth time.

"We'll make that call in court, Miss Tyler," the sergeant said sourly, leaning forward in an intimidating manner, as if he practised his intimidation techniques in front of the mirror in the morning. "For one, I believe you. Nice girl like you doesn't go around poisoning people until their brains leak out their ears. But nice girls do get caught up with bad men sometimes – we understand how these things happen. So tell us where we can find your boyfriend and we'll let you see your mother, alright?"

It took all of Rose's willpower not to screech like a banshee. "_Firstly_, he's _not_ even my boyfriend, he's just – a guy I travel with, and _secondly_, I told you, he's got nothing to do with those deaths. He was inebriated in hospital, for chrissake!"

The sergeant raised one eyebrow, again as if he had been practising. "The same hospital that he escaped from on the night of the latest murder? Right after we arrived to take him into custody?"

"He was kidnapped!" Rose replied, wilting a little at how unconvincing this sounded. One of the officers at the back of the room stifled a snigger. Rose felt her eye twitch.

"Look, let me – let me call Dr Mitchell, yeah?" she asked desperately, leaning forward and holding out her hands, still cuffed together. "You know he's not in on this – he tipped you guys off in the first place! I'll bring him in here and he'll tell you I'm not lying."

The sergeant shook his head. "You can call him later, Miss Tyler. If your boyfriend really is innocent, what's the harm of bringing him in to have a chat with us? I'm sure we can sort this whole mess out."

"I don't know where he is," Rose said through gritted teeth, avoiding the sergent's eyes because of an innate fear that he could tell she was lying. "He could be any…" as her gaze wandered across the room it fell on a television at the other end of the office. The sound was turned off but Rose could see the logo of the late-night news. The presenter's face appeared and then the screen switched to a wobbly camera shot of a building.

Rose flung her arms up and pointed to the screen. "That's Downing Street!"

The sergeant gave her a very patronising look. "Well done, Miss Tyler."

"Turn it up, please!" Rose begged.

The sergeant shook his head again, but the officer nearest the TV curiously switched on the volume.

"…footage captured about half an hour ago outside the Prime Minister's office. We remind viewers that the identity of the man accompanying the Prime Minister has not yet been confirmed, and the office bluntly refused to comment when contacted a few minutes ago. However…"

Rose didn't hear the rest. She felt the blood washed from her cheeks and her lower lip tremble a little as she watched a loop of Harriet Jones getting out of a long black car and hurrying up several steps to a back entrance of the building. Right behind her, ducking his head under a Burberry cap, was the figure of a man who, just as the two of them vanished into the doorway, looked up. His sideburn-clad face glowed on the screen for a moment and was gone.

"Oi? Was that…?" one of the officers squawked, grabbing the cigarette out of his mouth. Everyone in the room followed his gaze towards the back wall of the office, where the newspaper photo and freeze-frames from the schoolyard security camera had been plastered on wide glossy paper.

"Jesus, no, must be a media prank," the sergeant muttered, eyes boggling at the screen.

"Sergent, they… surely they wouldn't… unless they were totally sure…?"

The sergeant rubbed his mouth and mumbled something about what "constituted as ridiculous nowadays".

Rose looked from the television screen to the wall covered in clippings and photographs of the suspect. The Doctor's face stared back at her from dozens of angles. Copies amid copies: twists amid twists.

"It's not him," Rose croaked. "I… I fell for her trick…"

None of them were listening. The sergeant was barking at his men as fevered discussion broke out among the officers.

Rose buried her head in her chained hands. "I fell for it. Stupid ape. Mum was never in danger. She just wanted me out of the way. She was following the Prime Minister. And I didn't even warn Harriet Jones about the shapeshifters. _Stupid ape!_"

Her phone had been confiscated and locked up somewhere as evidence. That phone had her only record of the Prime Minister's extension number. She would have to reach Dr Mitchell, and if they drove really, really, fast, Harriet Jones might still be alive when they got there.

Rose looked up at the bickering officers. No one was even looking at her. She stood up and waited for someone to glance in her direction. No one did.

The door was right here. Rose sidled casually towards it, twisted the doorknob with both hands, slipped out into the corridor and, holding her manacled hands against her stomach, started to run.

----------------------------------

I've got holidays in a week so I might update the next chapter a bit faster. Fingers crossed.


	13. Mother and Child

I've shamed you all. I'm sorry I'm so late. I've never really had an end to this whole mess, and I still haven't, it's just a bit of a thrown-together bundle of silliness. I even had the chapter ready to post last Saturday but couldn't find a chance to transfer from laptop to clunky Hall computer. I really am sorry, and I hope it's not too painful/humourless a chapter. I will… stop whining now. Anyone notice I'm a Jackie fan?

I'm thinking one more chapter after this will wrap up the "Huh?"s.

------------------------------------------

Dr Mitchell's hands were locked around the steering wheel. _I am not going in there, _he thought. He imagined himself standing inside his own brain with a megaphone, addressing an unruly crowd of his own bad judgement. _I am not going in there! _

His bad judgement, which in this metaphor spoke and was dressed like a cockney factory worker, yelled, _you're such a civilian! There's a girl in there that needs our help!_

Dr Mitchell blustered into the imaginary megaphone: _I am probably going to lose my job as it is. I could go to jail. I don't even know if there's any way I can help Rose. And I'm really, really tired. I am staying here, and that's final!_

His protests were scratchy and weak. His curiosity had joined in with the howls to go and find out what was happening inside the police station. His good sense was quickly swamped by a blossoming sense of masculine heroism and scientific inquisitiveness. He forced his fingers to unclench the steering wheel.

"Where are you going?" The shapeshifter wailed as he got out of the car. It couldn't figure out how to work the doorhandle so it scrabbled at the window, it's young-Rose face wracked with distress. "Don't leave me alone!"

Dr Mitchell opened the passenger door, dismissing the observation that the girl's breath had not made a fog on the window.

"I'm just going to help Rose," he said, patting its shoulder and trying to conjure up the patient-soothing tone of the nurses at the hospital. "Keep the doors locked, okay?"

The girl nodded and shrunk back so that he could close the door. Dr Mitchell left the alien child with its hands pressed to the glass, watching him hurry towards the police station.

After a few minutes, the alien child managed to get the door of the car open. Leaving the mangled vehicle abandoned by the roadside, it trotted towards the warmth and light of the station, and a familiar voice that beckoned inside its mind,

-----------------------------------------

Two officers stopped him just inside the entrance and asked him his business. Dr Mitchell told them he had been asked to come in and see the sergeant. When the officers saw his hospital ID card they grudgingly pointed him towards the office where the secretary would give him further instructions, warning him that the sergeant and most of the officers were currently questioning someone in regards to their investigations.

Dr Mitchell thanked them and turned away in case they could see the sweat breaking out on his forehead. He quickened his pace, catching his feet on the squeaky lino floor and nearly falling over. Questioning someone? Were they questioning _Rose?_ Well, _obviously_, he reminded himself, Rose was the closest link to the top suspect. No wonder she'd taken so long getting back. She'd been arrested for perverting the course of justice (no doubt).

He was mulling angrily about this when he came around the corner and collided with the very blonde in question.

"Well," he huffed, grabbing her handcuffed wrists in the satisfactory fulfilment of his prediction. He couldn't think of anything to complete the 'well' so he decided to just glare.

The glare had no apparent affect on Rose's demeanour. She was out of breath, her hair hanging across her face, and there was an absence of the sarcastic eye-narrowing which she usually took on when looking at him. She just regained her balance after the collision and started running again, dragging Dr Mitchell with her.

"Hey, Rose, hang on a bit," he couldn't even hold her back with his own strength, but had to grab the corner of the wall to bring her up short.

"Let go!" she snapped, trying to jerk her wrists out of his grasp.

"Ow. You can't get out that way," the ginger-haired doctor replied, still holding onto the wall to keep Rose in one place. "Ahem! Listen! There are two policemen standing at the entrance."

Rose wilted and glanced around with wide, horror-filled eyes. "This way," she declared, heading for another corridor and pulling him along with her.

He managed to ask what was wrong as their footsteps clattered through the empty halls of the police station.

"The Prime Minister is going to be killed by an alien," Rose choked.

Dr Mitchell did a pretty good impression of her sarcastic-eye-narrowing expression.

"I saw it on TV!" she said defensively, sounding more like the Rose he was used to.

"Saw what?"

"The shapeshifter. The one I thought was going after my Mum. It was a trick. It was after Harriet Jones and it must have just wanted me out of the way. We have to get to Downing Street and warn her."

"Oh, _Rose_," Dr Mitchell sighed in exasperation.

She turned and tried to whack him with both fists. He ducked but failed to avoid her blow. "What was that for?" He raised his arms as she whacked him again.

"_I – am – doing – my – best!_" Rose snarled, attempting to punctuate each word with a punch. "I am trying to do what the Doctor would have done. I'm trying to fix things. If you aren't going to help, then get the hell out, yeah?"

She spun around and headed down the corridor looking for an exit. Dr Mitchell paused and then scampered after her.

"I'm sorry," he called timidly. Rose ignored him. He fell into step with her. "It's still all a bit of a dream, you see," he explained.

"Trust me, the sooner you realise this is the real world, the better off you'll be," she grunted.

"How do you know it's going to kill the Prime Minister?" he asked.

She frowned at him as she tried various doors in her hunt. "Well, it's pretty obvious, innit?"

He clicked his tongue. "I don't think that's it. I think these things _need_ a human to do their morphing thing."

She turned to look at him.

Dr Mitchell was chewing meditatively on his little finger. "I think I get how it works now – they _are_ like parasites, aren't they? They latch onto human beings and that's how they change their faces. One of them was on Dr Zellaby and making him look much younger. Is this making sense?"

He lowered his hand to look at Rose. She was gaping at him. At last she stammered, "I hadn't even thought of that!"

"Oh," he said with a frown. "I figured it out from the photograph in the newspaper, of course – the picture of your boyfriend wearing the victim's clothing. Clearly that wasn't him, that _was_ the victim – her face had been changed by the parasite to look like Peter Harkness… your Doctor man. Shooting itself in the face with the camera might even have been an accident."

Rose stared at him. She shook her head and made a wordless noise of disbelief, then tipped her head back and covered his face with her hands, the chain swaying against her chin. "It's the Slitheen all over again."

Dr Mitchell had no idea what a 'Sliv-veen' was, but he'd connected their two revelations together and come up with the frightening idea of a telepathic alien controlling the Prime Minister. "Blimmin' heck, we've got to get to Downing Street!" He cried, leaping back as if electrified.

"That's what I was trying to _tell_ you," Rose snapped, rolling her eyes as he broke into a dash.

"We're going in circles, let's try this way," the doctor suggested, pulling her down a wide flight of concrete stairs. "What were the Slitheen you were talking about? Has this happened _before?_"

"Sort of," Rose shrugged. "The man Harriet Jones replaced – he didn't have a heart attack like the newspapers' said. It was these big ugly bog-monster things that killed him and took over half the cabinet."

"Blimey," said Dr Mitchell, glancing back at her with a frown. "I _thought_ it seemed a big more than a hoax gone horribly wrong. Did they blow up Downing Street as well?"

"No," Rose chuckled as they passed through a barred door, hanging wide open. "That was the Doctor and me and my ex, Mickey. The missile killed all – well, almost all – of the Slitheen and saved the Earth from certain destruction."

Dr Mitchell stopped and goggled at her, his expression switching to highly sceptical. "No!"

"Yeah," Rose smiled, their plight forgotten for an instant. "That's when I first met Harriet Jones," a flash of fear struck her again. "Come on, I can't let her down, I'd never forgive myself."

"I feel more confident already," Dr Mitchell said acerbically. "You're clearly an expert."

"It's not like that. Mickey's gone, and now I haven't even got the Doctor, and it's all…" she froze and the neurosurgeon nearly ran into the back of her.

"Rose," cried a soft voice from the other end of the corridor.

Dr Mitchell felt Rose tremble and a squeak crept into her voice. "Mum."

Jackie Tyler, looking as if she had spent a night and a day in a police cell but otherwise no worse for wear, had stepped out of a door ahead of them. Her face glowed as she saw her daughter and she threw out her arms, sobbing. "Rose! Oh, thank God, I've been so terrified – I didn't even know if you were alive…"

Dr Mitchell had his hand on Rose's arm and he felt her tense, preparing to sprint to her mother even if she couldn't return the hug because of the endlessly troublesome handcuffs. He didn't know why, but he didn't let go of her.

Then a fourth voice entered the mix: Rose's voice, but slightly higher and queerer than Rose's voice. From behind them it called softly, "Grandmother?"

--------------------------------------------

Rose turned automatically. Travelling with the Doctor taught you lots of things, not least to look over your shoulder at every unexpected sound. Then the word hit Rose's brain, along with all it signified, the mistake she had made, and all the knowledge of what she would have to do to save Jackie and the Doctor.

The alien child was standing behind them in the centre of the corridor. Its arms hung by its sides. It seemed to resemble Rose less than it had the first time she encountered it, though she wasn't quite sure why. As she watched, its face shimmered slightly, the way Jack's had shimmered after Dr Mitchell brained him with the wastepaper bin.

Rose looked back at her mother and for an instant saw Jackie's face frozen in a sneer of hostility, then it became demure and loving once more.

"Who's this cupcake, Rose?" she asked.

Dr Mitchell's fingers were digging furrows into Rose's shoulder. She could feel numbing rage building up behind her eyes, but forced all thoughts from her head, knowing they were open to be read. She turned back to the young shapeshifter, smiling at it. "Come and meet my mother, honey," she said, holding her hand.

The doppelganger wandered forwards, glancing from her to Jackie. She slipped her hand into Rose's.

Rose bent down, putting both her hands on the doppelganger's shoulders. She asked softly, "Sweetheart, can you tell me, is that woman really my mother?"

"Yes, but she's also-" the girl began.

Jackie leapt forward. The doppelganger finished her sentence with a gulp as her grandmother silenced her with the speed of thought. But Rose moved fastest, hooking the chain of the handcuffs under the girl's throat. Jackie froze.

"Ah," squeaked the doppelganger.

Rose's head was lowered to keep both the shapeshifters in her sight. Her fringe kept getting in her eyes, but she didn't have a spare hand to brush it away. She didn't break eye contact with her 'mother'. She didn't need to say anything. Even if the message hadn't been so brutally obvious, the shapeshifter could just read her mind.

Dr Mitchell's pale surgeon-strong hand had latched onto her wrist. "I thought you said it was trying to get the Prime Minister…!"

"I was wrong. I was wrong _again_, Rose Tyler, _wrong again_, but _not this time._"

"What are you doing"

"She's got a hostage. Well, so do we."

"Don't you _dare_…" he breathed, "hurt her. She's an infant."

"Then give me another option," Rose replied, feeling disembodied by what she was saying.

Jackie took a sly step forward. Rose tightened the chain, pulling the young shapeshifter's head upwards.

"You wouldn't," her mother said in a shocked voice, leaning towards her with supplicating arms. "Rose, baby, I know you wouldn't do this – please, just let her go, we can talk about this…"

"_Stop talking like my Mum!_" Rose roared. Dr Mitchell flinched away.

Jackie straightened up, her eyes half-hooded. "You won't do it."

"You have no clue what I'm capable of!"

"I'm in your head, Rose. I don't need a clue."

A ripple flowed outwards from Jackie's face. In a flicker and a blur, Jackie Tyler disappeared and her long-dead husband stood in the white corridor, suited and grey-haired like the Pete living wifeless in the sideways dimension.

"It's a bit of an impasse, Rose," Pete said sternly, scratching his forehead in apparent exasperation. He sighed. "What can you do? Stand there all night until the cops come down to investigate?"

"Let my Mum go," Rose replied.

"How?" Pete snapped spread his arms. "What then? I'm trapped in this corridor with you. Look at me," he snorted. He spoke exactly as Pete spoke, in exactly his tone of gentle firmness and mild cynicism. "_You're_ in the position of power here, Rose. I'm not going to let go of my only bargaining chip. But think for a second, alright?"

"Shut up," Rose hissed.

"I'm not hurting Jackie," Pete continued earnestly. "She's not in any discomfort, okay? She's perfectly fine. So you just calm down for a second and think about what you're doing."

"You're going to kill her!"

"No Rose," said Pete Tyler. "I'm going to kill you."

Her small memories of her father, those painful, precious days that the Doctor had given her, and this creature was using them, _violating _them. Rose felt the fury rear up and she jerked the chain savagely, her thumbs digging into the back of the doppelganger's neck.

She wasn't trying to cause the girl pain, she hadn't even pulled that hard, but the young alien gave a high bark and Pete Tyler's face flashed with utmost horror, stumbling forward as if dragged by a string. Dr Mitchell lunged at Rose, yelling for her to stop, but he retreated again with a single look from her face.

Rose felt her resolve sway. I've gone too far. The Doctor wouldn't do this… 

Even as she thought it, she tried to sweep it away, but the brain just doesn't deal with those sorts of metaphors. Pete Tyler smiled pitilessly and dissolved. His face precipitated into the Doctor's.

"You knew we'd get here sooner or later," he said with a small grin, tucking his hands into his pockets.

Her Doctor stood there, exactly the way he always posed in his brown pinstripes, seeming to lean back slightly and draw her forward at the same time. As she watched, his face became troubled – disappointed with her. Rose's fury died down, even as she desperately tried to feed its flames. But the Doctor was disappointed with her – _he's not real_ – he wouldn't want this – _it's just an illusion!_ – he would have found another way – _well now there ISN'T another way_ – he would never had hurt anyone, killed anyone –_ HE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. HE IS NOT THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL!_ Rose's head screamed silently.

"You have to let her go," the Doctor said softly, except it had the planet-encompassing tone he liked to use when he had to move planets. Rose couldn't move planets. She couldn't do what he could do he. She _had_ to do _this_.

"Why? Because it's morally right? We've gone a bit beyond that, I think," Rose snapped, babbling to buy time to think. The Doc- the shapeshifter was right, they were both stuck. And _why_ wasn't Dr Mitchell doing anything to help?

"No," said the Doctor. "Because she's pregnant with the last of her species."

Rose looked down at the young girl and didn't believe it.

"It's true," the Doctor replied aloud to her thoughts. He was changing again – the Doctor's face shimmered and became Harriet Jones', commanding and maternal. "There are no fathers in our species: we are born carrying the first child of the next generation, gestating throughout our lifetimes until we come of age. I birthed my daughter and my granddaughter at once."

Dr Mitchell lurched forward. "That's incredible!" he cried. "Asexual reproduction at such a level of complexity – is it a recent evolutionary development, or is it common on your planet?"

Harriet Jones– _stop saying that! she/it is not Harriet Jones,_ Rose mentally slapped herself – turned to look at him with a curious frown. "I don't know. I am an historian, but there were few at home who studied our history before records. Our knowledge of our own biology is crude – even our medical knowledge."

Dr Mitchell nodded eagerly. "Your granddaughter said something about a sickness – of _course_ you would be vulnerable to disease, if each of you is a clone of her mother, sisters and children. What kills one, kills all. How did you even survive _this_ long?"

"I don't think that's helping," Rose snapped at him, but then she saw that Harriet Jones – the _shapeshipter_ – was looking puzzled.

"We had myths of the Time Lords," she/it mused, staring at Dr Mitchell. If Rose had been a fan of comic books and action films, she would have recognised that part of the story where the villain pours out their monologue right in time for the hero to break free and save the day. "Fairy tales. But as I delved deeper in our histories, I began to believe that they had lived and breathed. Yet not in ancient times, but _recently_ – perhaps even after my youngest granddaughter had been born. Yet they did not exist in this universe or this time: they had vanished from all time and all space. The histories suggested we had served them and they had preserved us from our weakness to pathogens, but now they lingered as myths, and also in the fact that our species was still alive when we should not have been: the Time Lords had saved us, time and time again, from the ravages of disease, and though we barely remembered them, still their actions existed – how? I don't know. But I knew that it wouldn't last."

Dr Mitchell had moved closer to the shapeshifter while it was speaking, (Rose noticed his hands were shaking) and he said, with only the hint of a stutter. "Why did you come here? To repopulate this planet?"

"To survive," the shapeshifter replied in a dead-tone mimic of the Prime Minister's voice. "The sickness is already festering in me. You saw my daughter with your own eyes," it hissed. "That's what will happen to me. That's what happened to everyone on my planet: we fled once we were certain no one was left to save. But we came here in the hope of saving my grandchild, and if not her, than _her_ child."

"How?" Dr Mitchell said in exasperation.

The shapeshifter turned its head towards Rose. "Humans. They're built of the same stuff as we are, the same molecules. But they can control it. They have science we couldn't even imagine. All we needed was the Time Lord's machine to translate their language. We could have hidden here. I could have lived in Michael Zellaby for decades, extending his life, while we engineered the next generation to be immune to the sickness."

Harriet Jones' polite face suddenly twisted beyond physical possibility, her voice turning into a hoarse animal-rasp. "We could have harmed no one. We could have hidden for generations and then returned home in the Time Lord's ship. But _you_ killed them – my daughter, my host, and now you'll take my child as well?"

"I'm sorry," whispered Rose, almost against her own will.

Dr Mitchell stepped closer to the shapeshifter. "What do you mean, harmed no one? You've been murdering people. You couldn't expect us to do anything other than react. We're survivors too."

"We couldn't prevent it," the shapeshifter said, the fury vanishing as it looked at the neurologist. "The sickness means makes it difficult to possess hosts without killing them, and I was exhausted by the journey here. We landed too far from where we knew the Time Lord's machine would be and my daughter had to carry my grandchild and I all the way to London. Each new host she took died so quickly."

"You kept killing," Rose pointed out, thinking of the caretaker – and her own aborted fate, when 'Jack' had taken her to the hospital and Dr Mitchell had saved her.

The shapeshifter turned its eyes towards Rose and she wished she hadn't spoken up. "You murderer!" Harriet Jones spat, face wavering like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, and next moment it leapt towards Rose.

But Dr Mitchell had gotten right up close to her now and he moved at almost the same moment, catching the hissing Prime Minister around the waist and trying to tackle it to the ground. "Rose!" he grunted. "Go for the back of the neck!"

The shapeshifter kept its footing and caught him a blow to the forehead with the heel of its palm. It didn't look like a heavy blow, but his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled with a cascade of muffled thumps. Now the two of them, Rose and Prime Minister, were facing each other in the corridor, with the wriggling shield of the doppelganger between them.

"What did you do?" Rose shrieked, trying to look for signs of life in Dr Mitchell and keep her eye on the shapeshifter at the same time.

"I need a new host once you're dead. Your mother won't do," the alien answered, rolling back its shoulders and straightening its prim ministerial skirt.

"Get back!" the human girl warned.

The shapeshifter changed. It was Jack again, beaming with a sharp-cut grin, holding out his hands to her. "Come on, Rose. Let the poor kid go. You don't want to get anyone hurt."

Rose shuffled back, carefully towing the doppelganger with her. "Where is he? Where's the real Jack?"

"Wherever you left him, I reckon," Jack replied, voicing soothing and familiar, matching her footsteps, drawing closer. "I plucked him outta your mind before you knew I was there. I had to get you to trust me implicitly, so that the Time Lord would do anything I told you to tell him."

Another step forward: Rose took another step back. "You don't have to worry, Rose. I'll be here to look after the Doctor once you're gone. Good out Jack taking care of him, making sure the humans don't find him. And you'll be there too."

It's face rippled and become a mirror: not the imperfect imitation that the young alien had crafted, but Rose exactly as she saw herself in that moment, hair awry, clothes wrinkled, face weirdly nude without its usual makeup. The shapeshifter didn't break stride, its voice briefly lingering as Jack's masculine baritone before becoming Rose's downtown London accent. Rose thought to herself, _huh. Do I really sound like that?_

"You'll be with him, whenever he needs you. You'll teach him to speak English, teach him to live like a human, now that he thinks can never work the TARDIS again. You can get a house together, pass the toast to each other in the morning, wake up in the same bed. The first to domesticate the Doctor," the Rose-copy grinned. "It'll be everything you'd never admit you wanted, even if it isn't really _you_. He won't even notice you're gone. Please, Rose, give me back my baby," the copy pleaded.

"Like you'll really do that. Even if you did, he'll know it's you," Rose stumbled over her words, glancing over her shoulder quickly then back at the shapeshifter.

"Would I?" the voice had changed. The copy-Rose blurred and restored itself into a face with a too-big nose and ears.

"Stop it!" Rose yelped.

Her first Doctor (_her true Doctor_, she thought before she would stop herself), said in the voice that she still expected to hear whenever the TARDIS engines quietened, "Come on, Rose. How many have I had before you? How many will there be after? I'm not going to notice you're gone. You can save an entire race – isn't that more important? Do you really want to kill a child and go back to me only to tell me you've put more blood on my hands?"

Rose shook her head, wishing she could just stop listening, but it could read her thoughts, it _knew_ what she was going to do before she even _did_ it…

"Rose," the face changed again, and the whiskered face reappeared, her Doctor, her final Doctor, the one she wanted to brush with her fingertips when he wasn't looking at her and burst with joy when he was.

"I'll tell him," the Doctor said gently, sticking his hands in his pockets and sauntering towards her. "When all this is over, when I've fixed the sickness, I'll tell him everything you couldn't bear to. I'll tell him you died helping me save my species. He'll understand. A little spark of life after all the death that came when his people died – that's the way he would want it."

Rose leaned forward and yelled, "You're imprisoning him! He'll die without his ship!"

"You don't know that, Rose. It's just what you want to be true. If it wasn't true, then why hasn't he settled down with you? What would it matter to him, immortal, if he spent a short lifetime with you? Or – the truth you don't want to face – do you come second to the ship and the travelling?"

"I'll kill her, I swear!"

"Our child?" the Doctor asked.

Rose's next shout swelled and was trapped in her throat. She looked down at the doppelganger, but it no longer resembled a schoolgirl-sized Rose Tyler. It had changed, maybe slowly while she hadn't been looking. It had the Doctor's rakish brown hair pulled into a ponytail, his nose and his cheekbones, but Rose's mouth and chin. It was the child Rose had thought about, telling herself she was too young for children, the child she'd imagined when she was half-asleep, the child that could no more exist than a hybrid of a bird and a fish. With the Doctor's eyes it looked up at her. Rose felt her hands loosen the chain around its neck of their own accord.

"That's not fair," she whispered.

"When you see my daughter in the afterlife, tell her that her children will not be following you," the treacherous Doctor replied.

The shapeshifter was so close she could have reached out and loosened its tie. It reached up and puts its hands on either side of her face. It was moving closer, trapping the child between them, raising its head to touch a kiss to her forehead.

She tried to pull away, but her body responded only with a quiver. Paralysed, she didn't panic. Rational thought told her she should have panicked, the best thing to do would _be_ a quick panic because she knew she was about to die looking at the one person she most trusted to keep her alive. Still, what did rational thought know about it?

At this moment, the shapeshifter invisibly met its match.

The hands on her face began to shake. A tendril of coercion she hadn't been aware of lifted itself from Rose's mind. She stumbled backwards, gulping lungfuls of air without realising how long she had stopped breathing, lifting the handcuffs over the young alien's head as she fell against the wall, gasping. The girl shimmered and turned back into the Rose-doppelganger.

The little girl ran towards her grandmother, still the Doctor in face and form, who was clutching the back of his/her/its head and whimpering.

"What it is? Don't do that!" the little alien squealed, clutching at one pinstriped elbow.

"Let go letgoLETGO!" the Doctor screamed. Then the noise became wordless, inhuman, rising to a pitch so loud Rose pressed her palms into her ears. In a moment it vanished. The Doctor's face contorted, mouth ajar, eyes squeezed shut. Rose became aware of a blue-green tinge to his fingers and the edges of his face. The tinge became a glow – his hands were on the back of his neck now – the little girl was sobbing and drawing away, covering its face – the pinstriped trousers were turning into dark blue denim – the elbows were going pastel-pink – his hair was getting longer and lighter –

-------------------------------------

Upstairs in the police station, the only three officers left in charge were still watching the telly. The journalist had managed to get inside the Downing St building and was hurrying upstairs in front of the camera, looking back over his shoulder to declare into the microphone how illegal this probably was going to be when security caught them. BREAKING NEWS was flashing from the bottom of the screen, apparently desperate to hold on to its viewers.

"There, there!" One of the officers gasped, grabbing the thigh of the officer next to him, who was too absorbed in the BREAKING NEWS to object.

The journalist hissed, "Here we are, right outside the Prime Minister's office, and –" he broke into a feedback inducing shout. "Prime Minister! Ma'am! May we have a word?"

Harriet Jones, speaking to a young, suited man behind a desk outside her office, looked up and radiated thunderous displeasure all the way to the officers back in the police station.

"Samson, call security," she said, without taking her eyes away from the camera.

"Prime Minister, I think you know why we're here," the journalist said at lightening-speed. "Couldn't you clear us up with a quick word?"

Harriet Jones opened her mouth, lips already a forming 'no comment', when the door to her office opened and the best thing that could have happened to the journalist, did happen. The face of the man who'd been sprinkled across the papers and television for the past few days appeared (attached to the rest of his body, of course).

Back in the police station, the three officers gave a collective gasp – along with every other soul in the nation who had been phoned by their cousins that night and told to turn on the telly, quick – and leaned forward, riveted to the screen.

Like a fly honing in on raw meet, the wobbly camera zoom focused in on the side-burned fellow, who had stepped outside of the office and realised too late the ambush he had walked into. The journalist gave an unprofessional squeak of joy and rushed past the Prime Minister, jamming his microphone towards the bemused-looking murderer who Harriet Jones had been harbouring in her office. Off camera, which was the only bit of luck she apparently going to get tonight, the Prime Minister went white as chalk.

The journalist squeezed into the frame of the telly, "Sir, sir, we can assume by now that the police are on their way, do you have anything to say before they get here?"

The murderer, Doctor, Time-Lord, mute, scratched the back of his head and opened his mouth…

------------------------------------------

There was the sound of sackcloth tearing. The doppelganger screamed and threw itself against the wall, curling up with its face turned away. Rose's stomach heaved and then lay prone on top of her liver, doing the best a stomach can to groan in nausea.

Jackie Tyler straightened up, her shoulders shivering and her lips pressed disapprovingly together. Her fingertips were dripping with a thin, cyan-coloured liquid. Something like a long, greenish slug lay unmoving at her feet. She looked like the only survivor of the Light Brigade, overlooking the corpse-ridden canyon.

------------------------------------------

… and opened his mouth and said. "It's a funny story, actually. But I can tell you now; there's been a _huge_ misunderstanding. I mean, _huge_. Think of the biggest thing you can possibly imagine and I tell you, it's at least – we-ell, at least a third as big as that thing. But I suppose I'm probably imagining something far huger than you are, you probably thought of a whale or Australia or somesuch and it's much huger than that. It's sort gone beyond misunderstanding and into something else, but I'm afraid there isn't a word for this kind of misunderstanding in English, which is rather sad really. There _is_ a word for it which my people invented quite a long time ago to describe the time when they mistook a very nice series of gift baskets from our neighbours for multiple assassination attempts and they…"

"Doctor," snapped Harriet Jones. It had taken her that long to recover from the shock of hearing him speak.

"What? Oh, right, well," the side-burned man cocked his head at the befuddled journalist and put his arm around him, grinning into the camera. "Let me tell you how this all has been blown out of proportion. You see, I'm not a murderer, and…"

------------------------------------------

"Mum?"

Jackie's eyes came to life and focused on Rose. She stopped looking like a tragic queen and started looking like a very, very worried mother.

"Sweetheart! Oh, thank _God!_" she shrieked, bounding towards Rose like a woman at least four years younger.

Rose stepped away from the wall, found that she was shaking too much to exert much more effort than that, and let her mum's arms and her mum's warmth and her mum's plaintive baby-talk wrap around her. Jackie collided with her and enveloped her completely, almost lifting her off her feet. It was like being wrapped in hot, sweaty marshmallows. Rose buried her face in Jackie's pink hoodie and _forced_ herself not to cry.

"My baby, oh thank goodness, oh, Rose, sweetheart, darling, you're _alive_," Jackie's monologue went on in this vein for some time. It took a while before Rose found a gap to wedge a question into.

"What did you do, Mum?"

Jackie sniffed and took a step back, inspecting her daughter through red-rimmed eyes. "I'm not really sure, sweetheart. I couldn't really see anything, the last thing I remember is sitting in the police cell. After that it was like being half-asleep. But I knew you were in danger."

Rose looked down at the blue-green slug lying on the floor, already starting to shrivel a little. The young doppelganger, curled tightly up, was pressing itself so hard against the wall it looked as if it might push right through. It was rocking slightly, face hidden in the crook of its elbow. Rose felt her stomach give another nauseous complaint.

"You… ripped it right off you," Rose said faintly.

Jackie rubbed her cheek with one hand. "It was going to kill you."

"You heard it say that?"

"It sort of filled up my whole head, darling, I was so horrible," Jackie shivered. "Whenever it thought of you it just hated you so much. It was hard to think, but I thought, I've got to help my daughter, that's all that matters. And I heard someone say, 'go for the back of the neck'. So when it began to turn all its attention on you, that's what I did."

"That was Dr Mitchell," Rose glanced at the ginger-haired man lying face down further along the corridor, enhancing the impression that she was looking at a summarised war-zone. She wanted to go and help him, but that would mean stepping over that blue-green alien corpse.

"Oh!" Jackie saw the doctor and put her hand to his mouth. "Is he alright?"

Even as she said it, Dr Mitchell's hand balled into a fist and he raised his head, moaning a melodramatic, "Owwww." He pushed himself up onto his knees, rubbing his forehead.

Then he saw the doppelganger and the greenish corpse, and must have very rapidly put two and two together. He got to his feet, took off his doctor's coat and draped it over the dead shapeshifter. This human ritual complete, he walked slowly over to the alien child, but his eyes met Rose's as she watched him over Jackie's shoulder.

"Mum did it," Rose blurted before she could stop herself. "She was just protecting me."

Dr Mitchell nodded and looked away. He gently pulled the doppelganger's shivering arm down low enough to see its face and murmured to it. Rose couldn't hear what he was saying and she didn't really want to. After some minutes, the doppelganger began to sob. Dr Mitchell guided its arms around his neck and picked it up, its legs wrapped around his waist. It continued to weep into his shoulder.

"Come on, Mum, we've got to go before the police find us here," Rose said, trying to sound sensible but mostly just wanting to cover that pitiful sound. Her mother was staring at the little girl, so she cleared her throat and took Jackie's hand. Jackie looked back at her quickly.

"Don't you think I should stay here?" her mother asked with that absent-minded sneer she was so good at. "I mean, suppose the policemen come back. Look a bit funny, wouldn't it, if I've taken off? They've got my address and everything."

"Yeah, okay – no, actually Mum, I think you should come with us. We'll leave a note for the policemen," Rose said reassuringly, patting her mother's shoulder. She couldn't bear to let Jackie out of her sight again.

"Sweetheart, you can't just leave them a _note_."

There was a very brief argument. Rose won, but only because she was so tired she didn't have time to be patient and started to shout. Jackie was obviously surprised and obeyed diligently from then on.

"What do we do with that?"

"With what?" Dr Mitchell raised his head.

Rose twitched her hand at the hidden alien corpse.

"Oh. Wrap it up and take it with us," he said with a shrug. This was clearly an order, which she did her best not to roll her eyes at.

They left the way they had come, through the front door, which now stood unguarded. Security cameras watched them go, Dr Mitchell carrying the child with the strangely blurred face and Rose cradling what looked like a baby wrapped in a white coat, but tomorrow the tapes would be curiously missing from the stack in the storage room (though not Jackie's carefully penned note apologising for her leave of absence from the cell, which politely pointed out that the door had been left unlocked so she assumed it was okay.)

------------------------------------------

Rose gently placed the corpse of the shapeshifter in the boot next to its daughter's body and the maimed form of Dr Zellaby, covered by a tarpaulin of Dr Mitchell's. It felt like the right time for a eulogy. Instead, she shut the boot and went round to get into the car.

There were a lot of big gaps in the conversation on the way home. The doppelganger sat in the front, unspeaking, staring straight ahead.

"What you gonna do with the car?" Rose asked. "It's bound to get connected to one of the crimes."

Dr Mitchell shrugged. "Eh. I could call up and say it was stolen this afternoon."

"They won't believe you. And it's got Dr Zellaby, and the other two bodies."

"I suppose."

"This is such a mess," Rose muttered, leaning her head against the window. "And I've got to find the Doctor," she added aloud, to make sure Dr Mitchell didn't forget. She never thought she would say that phrase reluctantly, but there it was. She wanted to see him before anything else could happen, but at the same time, she had never felt less horrified by the thought of his face. It had come so close to being the last thing she saw before she died.

Like that was anything new. It wasn't like this was the first time she'd nearly died in his presence. "Harden up," she whispered to herself under her breath.

"You want to go to Downing Street? In this car? At _this_ time?" Dr Mitchell asked, catching her eye in the mirror.

Rose shook her head. "Back to the rugby club. He'll be where the TARDIS is. Unless the paparazzi has caught him and Harriet Jones has been impeached. "

In the rearview mirror, Dr Mitchell's eyes grew wide at the very thought. He switched on the radio, which was already tuned to the AM news station.

The late-night presenter was just fading out a 1960s jazz record. "And in recent developments," he said, in the sort of voice that suggested he wore a tie even on the radio and never forgot to turn his mic off during the songs, "The mysterious deaths across the country that police had dubbed homicides have turned out to be the product of a little known, very serious strain of rabies. The disease apparently causes toxic shock and hallucinations that resulted in the victims' sudden and unexplained journeys of, in one case, over fifty miles. The man implicated in the deaths by the media has been tracked down and turns out to be a doctor studying the disease, who also happens to be an "old boyfriend" of Prime Minister Harriet Jones. Earlier this morning he explained that he was trying to track its spread when he too was infected and hospitalised for what staff thought a stroke and, he says, in a fever-induced delirium he escaped the hospital and recovered on his own a day later. Luckily his research has allowed him to build up a resistance to the disease and so survive it, and he insists that the outbreak has now been contained and gives his consolation to the victims' families."

The presenter gave a self-conscious cough, which clearly said that he never wanted to report anything like that ever again, and put on a Vivaldi piece, full of violas and cellos.

Rose smiled at last.

"You've been awful quiet, Mum."

Jackie looked up and leaned across to rest her bleached hair on Rose's shoulder. "Just thinking."

"About what you did?" Rose asked quietly.

"About what we both did."

"How'd you…?"

"She was inside my head, Rose, and I was inside hers. I know what you did, even though I know you were just defending yourself and she didn't. It's a funny sort of world, innit? That way it turned out like that," Jackie murmured. "Mother and daughter… and us. But if it had been me and you instead of them, at least we wouldn't have left someone behind."

Rose felt as if a thin stream of icy water had been drizzled down the back of her neck. She couldn't stop herself glancing up at the front seat, but it didn't look like Dr Mitchell or the Doppelganger could hear them over Vivaldi's singing string orchestra. "I know," she whispered. "Don't think about it too much, yeah?"

"I was just thinking, she was only doing what I would have done, only I wouldn't have been so clever about it. If anyone ever hurt you, Rose, I'd kill them. In a second," Jackie, looking at the back of Dr Mitchell's seat, stretched her arm around Rose's waist. "Or if that Doctor of yours ever comes back without you."

"Mum, don't say that," Rose scolded.

"As if you didn't know." Jackie replied.

------------------------------------------------


End file.
